New publication!

Migration Studies

Prof. Arek Wisniowski published in February a new article in the prestigious journal “Migration Studies”. This new article explains that undercounting is a critical issue in migration statistics, resulting in bias. 

It typically arises from insufficient reporting requirements and problems with enforcing such requirements. The main sources of information on undercounting are the metadata accompanying official statistics and expert opinions. 

However, metadata and arbitrary expert opinions may be limited by overlooking important details in migration data shared by various countries. This includes potential oversight of changes in methodologies, definitions, or retrospective updates to the data following censuses.

In their paper, Prof. Wisniowski and his colleagues present a methodological solution with three objectives to address undercounting in international migration data. First, they provide an overview of available metadata and expert opinions on undercounting in European migration flows. 

Second, they propose a novel data-driven approach that incorporates year-specific and duration-of-stay-adjusted classifications. The proposed methodological solution relies on comparisons of flows in the same direction reported by a given country with high-quality data reported by another set of countries. 

They use bilateral migration data provided by Eurostat, UN and selected national statistical institutes. Duration-of-stay correction coefficients are derived through an optimization model or borrowed from the literature. Metadata and expert opinion scores can also be integrated to classify undercounting. Finally, they provide a dynamic classification of undercounting for 32 European countries (2002-2019), accessible through an online Shiny application, offering flexibility and adaptability.

Their findings highlight significant undercounting in new EU member states, particularly Bulgaria, Latvia, and Romania. Interestingly, other European countries, including those presumed to maintain reliable population statistics, also exhibit notable periods of undercounting.