International migration in the “Global South”: Data choices and policy implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International migration to and between developing countries (the “Global South”) is generally thought to be increasing. We show that this belief stems from the fact that three choices are commonly made when data are analysed: (a) to report migrant counts as absolute figures rather than expressing these as percentages of their respective populations; (b) to use UN DESA’s regional rather than the World Bank’s economic definitions of “Global South” and “Global North”; and (c) to include refugees and asylum seekers in migrant counts rather than excluding them. This article contends that when discussing the relationship between migration and development, there are stronger arguments for making the opposite choices stated, and that when this is done, the results show a steady decline between 1990 and 2015 in the percentage of the South’s total population who are international migrants. This finding has radical implications for migration research and policy, which we briefly describe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.076 | 0.145 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".