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Mobility Hub or Hollow? Cross-border Travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995-2016
Emanuel Deutschmann, Ettore Recchi & Federica Bicchi
MPC Annual Conference, 8 June 2018, MPC, San Domenico di Fiesole
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Why do we need a global mobilities database (GMD)?
• Mobility across national borders is a key feature of our age
• Migration captures only a part of human population flows and should be framed as part of the ‘mobility revolution’ spanning all over the globe
• To date, no project has aimed at collecting a comprehensive, up-to-date global database of the many different forms of human transnational mobility, from long-term resettlements to everyday commuting
A global mobilities database (GMD) could facilitate original research in this area, allow to generate new insights through increased comparability between sources, and save individual researchers countless hours of work
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Our goals
1. To provide a comprehensive resource on dyadic data on global mobilities and create a platform where all existing sources are gathered
2. To standardize the data from different sources, thereby increasing comparability and reducing the amount of work for individual researchers in the field
3. To make sense of the multiplex nature of human mobility (both theoretically and empirically), through a typology of different forms of human mobility
4. To make the database publicly available and to conduct original comparative research with it
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Overview: Four dimensions of the GMD
Demographic Migrants, tourists, students, asylum-
seekers, …
Economic Transportation costs, transportation
infrastructure, administrative costs of travelling, …
Sociological Communication via phone, mail, social media; knowledge and attachment to
other countries, …
Legal-political Visa waiver policies, migration policies,
border protection, …
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How many migrants on this flight?
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Travel arrivals in comparison with other types of mobility (worldwide)
Sources: Travel arrivals: UNWTO (2016), Migrants: Abel & Sander 2017 (estimate of global migration
flows from 2005-2010 period divided by 5), Refugees and asylum-seekers: UNHCR Global Trends 2016.
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200,000,000
400,000,000
600,000,000
800,000,000
1,000,000,000
1,200,000,000
Travels Refugees Migrants Asylum-seekers
Mobility in the Mediterranean – two theoretical imageries
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Mobility Hub
Neo-Braudelian perspective of Mediterranean as a dense area of
mobility; space of connectivity between micro-environments
(Horden and Purcell 2000)
Mobility Hollow
“Rio Grande” perspective postulating an increased cleavage
between North and South
Hypothetical network structure Hypothetical network structure
Analytical steps
1. Open up the black box of the Mediterranean to find out which of the two theoretical imageries fits best, via
a) “deductive” approach: pre-defined division into North and South
b) “inductive” approach: community detection algorithm detects clusters
2. What may account for the structure of travels in the Mediterranean? Here, we focus on economic forces and explore the possible role of
a) the wealth gap between countries
b) the wealth of the sender country
c) the wealth of the receiver country
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Data
Travel arrivals dataset from the Global Mobilities Project (GMP) at the MPC/EUI; Original source: World Tourism Organization, originally 219 excel files (UNWTO 2015).
Relatively complex standardization since country-to-country flow data is reported in twelve different categories in the UNWTO data, the most common of which is ‘arrivals of non-resident tourists at national borders, by country of residence.’
Note that the term ‘tourists’ in this definition does not necessarily mean holiday travelers but rather non-resident visitors who stayed at least one night in the receiver country.
Data on economic differences between countries was created from World Bank data on GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity.
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Note: Based on the version of the dataset that contains missing values. The figure is based on the mean number of
travels per 1000 sender-country inhabitants per country pair in a specific region. Source: Global Mobilities
Project, MPC/EUI 2018
A first glance at the data: Travel in the Mediterranean in global comparison, 1995-2016 worldwide
within the Mediterrane
an
0
5
10
15
20
25
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95
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96
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97
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98
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99
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00
20
01
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03
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Mea
n n
um
ber
of
trav
els
per
10
00
sen
der
-co
un
try
inh
abit
ants
per
co
un
try
pai
r
→ Is the Mediterranean indeed a mobility hub?
Countries
North Albania, Bosnia &
Herzegovina, Croatia,
Cyprus, France, Gibraltar,
Greece, Italy, Malta,
Slovenia, Spain, Turkey
South Algeria, Egypt, Israel,
Jordan, Lebanon, Libya,
Morocco, Palestine, Syria,
Tunisia
1a. Dissecting the Mediterranean into North and South
Note: Figure based on population-size adjusted version of the data. Source: Global Mobilities Project, MPC/EUI
A closer look at the inequality of travel flows…
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France - Spain
Italy - France
France - Italy
Syria - Israel
→ Power law structure
2016
1b. Detecting communities, 1995
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1b. Detecting communities, 2005
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1b. Detecting communities, 2015
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2. The correlation of economic inequalities with mobility in the Mediterranean
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→ Wealth inequality between sender and receiver not relevant
→ Wealth of the receiver not relevant
→ Wealth of the sender matters!
Conclusions
• Travelling is distributed extremely unequally in the Mediterranean.
• There is a clear division between travel within the North (a lot, strong increase over time) and the South (few, little increase over time).
• South-North and North-South travel is very scarce and does not increase over time.
• This picture is confirmed in the inductive analysis, where localized mobility clusters are identified by network density.
• Travel flows in the Mediterranean do not follow the axis of economic inequality; rather they appear to be driven by sender-country wealth.
Overall these findings support the idea of the Mediterranean as a mobility hollow rather than a mobility hub.
There is (legal) mobility around, not across the Mediterranean.
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Thank you for your attention!
Emanuel Deutschmann | [email protected]
Ettore Recchi | [email protected]
Federica Bicchi | [email protected]
www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/globalmobilities/
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