An analysis on the interaction between migration and redistributive policies

Abstract

This study tries to explain a cause and effect chain, how does a redistributive policy impacts on migration, and how does migration impacts on the wages of the different agents in the two economies under analysis. The model in use has two countries identical in all aspects except that one has a tax/subsidy scheme and the other does not. There are two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, and only the skilled workers have the possibility to migrate. The tax is charged proportionally on the skilled workers’ wage and then distributed, lump sum, among the unskilled workers. Findings show that there is a range of values for the tax to maximize the unskilled workers wage of the country where the tax is launched that goes in line with the ones reported by OECD (2012). Another finding is that there is a reduction on the wage gap between the two types of workers in the country where there is no tax.

Date of Award	28 Oct 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Teresa Lloyd-Braga (Supervisor) & Manuel Leite-Monteiro (Co-Supervisor)