The Indirect Estimation of International Migration Flows by Age and Gender

Raphael Nawrotzki, University of Colorado at Boulder
Leiwen Jiang, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

This paper reports on the methods used to generate a novel data set of age and gender profiles for country specific migrant flows with approximately global coverage. We employ raw data from the United Nations Global Migration Database (UNGMD). We selected the best data for two years closest to 2000. The age and gender profiles were computed in three different ways, 1) by using information directly from the selected file; 2) by borrowing information from other files; and 3) by applying gender and age information derived from aggregated region-level streams. Finally, we compute age and gender profiles of migrant flows by employing formal demographic tools to adjust the estimates for mortality and fertility. The generated data set of 3,850 streams will be valuable source to investigate global migration patterns and may be used for population projections.