It has long been argued that even relatively small increases in global migration could result in gains that far exceed the total of all foreign aid or the total gains from relaxing all remaining trade barriers. The migrants themselves typically experience large, immediate, and persistent income gains that are much greater than from any other evaluated policy intervention that I know about. There are also broader benefits to sending countries through remittances, knowledge transfers, trade facilitation, and many other channels. Yet despite this promise, in two decades at the World Bank, I’ve only managed to work on one successful operational project that let more people benefit from such opportunities – work on developing and evaluating a seasonal migration program from the Pacific Islands to New Zealand. This led me to wonder whether I’m just missing out, and how much governments are borrowing and spending to facilitate more benefits from migration.
World Bank Lending on Migration and Refugees
In a recent paper just published in the journal World Development (ungated), Charlotte Müeller, Pablo Acosta and I look at this issue. We examine World Bank lending documents from 2014 to 2024 to examine how much got spent on international migration in a decade. We find the World Bank had 160 operational projects related to international migration and refugees over this decade, totaling $40 billion, of which $15 billion was allocated to components pertaining to migration. This represents approximately 5% of total World Bank lending, commensurate with the size of migrants and refugees in the world population, with the migration-specific components totaling 2% of lending. So at a very aggregate level, it seems like a lot is being spent. However, this money is heavily concentrated in a small number of countries (half of all spending was just in the eight countries Uganda, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Colombia, and Djibouti), and almost entirely for projects to help countries and their host communities cope with an influx of refugees. In contrast, only $110 million across 7 projects, or approximately $11 million a year over 2014-24, (0.015% of the World Bank’s annual lending) was dedicated to activities to increase international worker mobility or help better prepare workers for work abroad.
