Structural Change, Economic Crisis and International Labour Migration in East Asia

Abstract

This paper has two objectives. First, it seeks to fill a gap in the knowledge of East Asian internationalisation and economic integration by examining labour migration in the pre-crisis period, and its association with structural change. Second, it examines the impact of the East Asian crisis on ILM. This enables us to speculate on the extent to which the crisis has disturbed the pre-crisis pattern of increasing ILM that was associated with rapid structural change and internationalisation. The paper examines the tension between longer-term structural factors that had driven increasing ILM, on the one hand, and the abrupt impact of the Asian economic crisis on the demand for migrant workers on the other. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 maps the relationship between ILM and structural change during the boom period of economic growth and globalisation, focusing on the decade before the economic crisis in East Asia. Section 3 surveys the impact of the Asian economic crisis on labour mobility, focusing on the four economies most affected by the crisis. In Section 4 I look briefly at trends in business and professional migration followed by some concluding remarks.