Migration Flow Estimation from Stocks

Migration flow estimation from stocks reconstructs the unobserved movement of people between countries from something that is observed: how many foreign-born residents each country holds, broken down by country of birth, at two points in time. Most countries report migrant stocks — the number of people living abroad by where they were born — far more reliably than they report flows, the year-by-year counts of who moved where. Guy Abel's 2013 method, refined in the Abel and Cohen 2019 release covering 200 countries, treats the change in these bilateral stock tables between two censuses as the net result of migration plus births and deaths, and solves for the smallest set of origin-to-destination flows that could have produced the observed change. The approach rests on demographic accounting: a stock at the end of a period equals the stock at the start, plus births into the group, minus deaths, plus arrivals, minus departures. By fixing the demographic margins and minimizing flows, it turns a fragmentary stock record into a complete, comparable flow table. This has become the standard way to build globally consistent five-year migration flow estimates where direct flow data simply do not exist.