Transnational and local entrepreneurship

Abstract

International migration affects many countries, be they sending or receiving countries. As a rule, the developed countries are the labour receiving countries (or the countries of destination, or host countries), and the developing or underdeveloped countries are labour sending countries (or the source, or home countries). When international migration takes the form of mass migration, then it obviously has significant effects on both sending and receiving countries. The impact on the sending and receiving countries differs considerably. The most important effect of international labour migration on the receiving countries is that it covers their labour shortages, and in this sense these countries have clearly benefited from international migration (Gitmez, 1981; Salt, 1983). However, the impact of international migration on the sending countries remains quite controversial, and different schools of thought reach opposite conclusions. Since most of the early researchers concentrated upon the determinants of international migration, namely the impacts of these movements on the receiving countries and the impacts of remittances on sending countries (Lucas, 1981; Keely, 1989; Appleyard, 1989; Borjas, 1989), they could not consider the later effects of international migration on the sending countries. © Thomas Faist and Eyüp Özveren 2004.