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Emigration and Trust: Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

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Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being

Part of the book series: Societies and Political Orders in Transition ((SOCPOT))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between emigration and social trust in the societies of origin. We combine both country-level and individual-level data on exposure to emigration and different forms of trust among residents of Eastern European and Central Asian sending countries. Our results provide tentative evidence that large emigration flows are potentially detrimental to trust formation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    However, the relationship between trust and economic growth is rarely studied for the subset of transition countries, despite the extensive literature on social and institutional trust in Eastern Europe (see also Bartolini et al., 2015).

  2. 2.

    European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) (2016).

  3. 3.

    According to the World Bank, at the level of 2019 the population figures are: 2.08 million in Macedonia, 2.66 million in Moldova, 6.94 million in Serbia, 9.32 million in Tajikistan, 18.51 million in Kazakhstan, and 44.39 million in Ukraine. World Bank, Total population, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL.

  4. 4.

    World Bank estimate.

  5. 5.

    UNDP, World Population Prospects, Revision 2019.

  6. 6.

    https://www.statistica.md/category.php?l=en&idc=103,

    https://esa.un.org/miggmgprofiles/indicators/files/Moldova.pdf.

  7. 7.

    http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934-1199807908806/Moldova.pdf.

  8. 8.

    According to the World Bank database, the received personal remittances to the GDP hit the massive share of 49.29% in 2008, and has never gone under 26% ever since. For more details, see http://data.worldbank.org/indicator. Official statistics account only for the formal channels of money transfer and underestimate actual remittances (Malyuchenko, 2015).

  9. 9.

    “Treaty on the settlement of issues of dual citizenship between the Republic of Tajikistan and the Russian Federation” September 7, 1995, Bulletin of international agreements of the Russian Federation 2, 1997.

  10. 10.

    Inglehart, R., C. Haerpfer, A. Moreno, C. Welzel, K. Kizilova, J. Diez-Medrano, M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin and B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2014. World Values Survey: All Rounds—Country-Pooled Datafile 1981–2014. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp. EVS (2011): European Values Study 2008: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2008). GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA4800 Data file version 3.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.11004.

  11. 11.

    Brücker H., Capuano, S. and Marfouk, A. (2013). Education, gender and international migration: insights from a panel-dataset 1980–2010, mimeo. Available at: http://www.iab.de/en/daten/iab-brain-drain-data.aspx.

  12. 12.

    The emigration rates from 1980 are matched with the Wave 1 (1981–1984), those from 1990 to Wave 2 (1989–1993), from 1995 to Wave 3 (1994–1998), from 2000 to Wave 4 (1999–2004), from 2005 to Wave 5 (2005–2009), and from 2010 to Wave 6 (2010–2014).

  13. 13.

    Available at: http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators.

  14. 14.

    As it follows from the results of the Hausman test, the H0 cannot be rejected and thus the random effects model is more efficient. Similarly, a higher ‘between’ variation in comparison to the ‘within’ variation, also suggests we use the random effects specification. The Breusch and Pagan Lagrangian multiplier test for random effects rejects the H0, thus making a simple OLS regression inappropriate.

  15. 15.

    Models 5 and 6 in Table 10 and 6 in Table 11 in Appendix, demonstrate only a change in the magnitude of the coefficients of interest but not of their significance in case when the controls are present in the specifications. Nevertheless, we refrain from interpreting the above-mentioned models.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Macro-level variables
Table 8 Variables from the UNDP social exclusion survey

List of countries included in the IAB-Data:

Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Azerbaijan, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Armenia, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Belarus, Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Rep., Denmark, Dominican Rep., Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Palestine, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, South Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania,Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Viet Nam, Slovenia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Macedonia, Egypt, United Kingdom, Tanzania, United States, Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Serbia and Montenegro, Zambia, North Ireland (Tables 9, 10 and 11).

Table 9 Correlation matrix, macro variables
Table 10 Cross-country results: generalized trust, total emigration rate
Table 11 Cross-country results: generalized trust, emigration rates by educational levels
Table 12 Social and other forms of trust by migration plans and country
Table 13 Social and other forms of trust by return migration and country, UNPD SES data
Table 14 Social and other forms of trust by remittances and country, UNPD SES data

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Radu, D., Skoglund, E., Ma, S. (2021). Emigration and Trust: Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In: Almakaeva, A., Moreno, A., Wilkes, R. (eds) Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75813-4_3

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