MIGRATION, EDUCATION & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Migration and education have long been issues of major interest in regional science, economics and geography. The interest is quite understandable because they can have substantial consequences for society, individuals, regions and families. Exactly how migration and education affect economic development and inequality (positively and negatively) is not fully resolved. Recognising this, we look at the positive and normative roles that migration and education can play in determining economic prosperity. To serve this purpose, the thesis builds frameworks using dynamic general equilibrium theory to provide some analytical solutions and applies these empirically with panel data to determine the impacts of migration in a market economy. Overall, empirically we find that disparities among individuals and regions still exist despite the migration process. However, migration and education are both susceptible to market failure due to fixed costs and liquidity constraints. The thesis moves on to examine the role and incentives for facilitating education and migration in non-market environments. In particular, we examine these processes within intergenerational family settings. Intra-family intergenerational transfers motivated by altruism are studied but we show that public intervention is also generally necessary to achieve Pareto optimality. Finally we consider the empirical evidence on intergenerational mobility in education and occupation for migrants.