APA Monthly Webinar, Quantifying Global International Migration, Professor Guy Abel

Quantifying Global International Migration

Accurate data on international migration flows remains one of the most critical gaps in global demographic research and policy-making. This talk presents a comprehensive overview of methods developed to estimate migration flows between all countries worldwide. We explore three complementary approaches: indirect estimation using United Nations migrant stock data, direct estimation via digital trace data from over three billion Facebook users, and a deep learning model that reconciles multiple data sources to produce annual origin-destination stock and flow estimates.

Guy Abel is a statistical demographer who works predominantly with migration data to better predict past and future movement patterns and gain a richer understanding of how migration varies by core demographic variables such as age, sex, and education. Before joining the HKU Department of  Sociology, he was a professor at the Asian Demographic Research Institute based at Shanghai University and a researcher at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

He has also worked as a consultant for Facebook, the International Organization for Migration, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank and taught courses on using R at the KOSTAT-UNFPA Summer Seminar on Population.