Bilateral international migration flow estimates

Estimates of bilateral international migration flows between 1990-1995 and 2015-2020 based on methods presented in Abel & Cohen (2019).

See the Figshare collection for other files, including additional bilateral estimates by type of move (outward migration, return migration, and transit migration).

You might also be interested in files for sex-specific bilateral international migration flow estimates, provided in another Figshare collection.

Download

Use the download button above for the CSV file or run the code below to directly bring into R:

library(readr)

f <- read_csv("https://figshare.com/ndownloader/files/53235671")

Version Details

Update of estimates of international migration flows from Abel & Cohen (2019) based on the most recent published UN DESA International Migrant Stock (IMS2024) and World Population Prospects (WPP2024) data inputs.

Refer to Version 1 (link above) for the estimates presented in the paper, based on WPP2017 and IMS2017.

A description of the changes between each version of the estimates can be found here.

Data Details

Row for each migration corridor-period combination (228 origins × 228 destinations × 4 periods + 230 origins × 230 destinations × 2 periods = 313,736).

Three columns for each of the data dimensions:

year0	First year of five-year period
orig	Origin ISO three letter country code
dest	Destination ISO three letter country

See the county list file for country names corresponding to the ISO three letter country codes.

Six columns of estimated flows from six different flow-from-stock estimation method:

sd_drop_neg	Stock differencing, drop negative values
sd_rev_neg	Stock differencing, reverse negative values to counterflow
mig_rate	Migration rates method
da_min_open	Demographic accounting, minimize migrant transitions (maximize stayers) - open accounting system
da_min_closed	Demographic accounting, minimize migrant transitions (maximize stayers) - closed accounting system
da_pb_closed	Demographic accounting, pseudo-Bayesian average of migrant transitions and stayers - closed accounting system

Refer to the published paper for detailed information on each method and usage notes.