Understanding Migration Dynamics in Georgia: Impacts, Policies, and Societal Changes

1. Georgia – On the Move Caucasus Research Resource Centers & International School of Economics at TSU Robert Tchaidze, ISET & IMF Tina Zurabishvili, CRRC & Telavi State University 1

2. Why Georgia? • Socially minded reforms top new government agenda; • Rose Revolution & Russian embargo changing migration trends with important impacts and implications for development; • Economic and business climate reforms and high growth create prospects for return migration and immigration; • IDPs and ethnic minority communities create different patterns within the same country; • Only descriptive research with limited policy implications for migration and development carried out. 2

3. Migration Dynamics in Georgia • Post-soviet reorganization of industrial geography and the resulting movement of labor; • The effect of conflicts in the region on movement of people; • The “westward” reorientation of emigration is believed to be changing gender and human capital composition of migrants; • Radical current reformation of the economic, legal and political life and the resulting change in migration flows. 3

4. Policies Pull Factors • European Neighborhood Policy: return and readmission agreements. Push Factors • Re-conceptualization of social welfare net, active labor market policies; • Development of a regional policy: minimizing push factors in vulnerable communities. Other factors • Banking and taxation policies to increase legal flow of remittances; • Tax breaks for return migrants. 4

5. Impact Economic: GDP structure; remittances; brain drain/gain; real estate; rural-urban composition; anything else? Social: Ethnic map being re-drawn; Gender roles being re-formulated; Family structures being re-organized; Georgian way of life being re-defined; Anything else? 5

6. Analyzing Migration Impacts, Causality • Hard to make causality claims. • Additional difficulty posed by self-selection into migration (endogeneity problem). • Econometric “toolbox” for dealing with causality issues. 6

7. Why us? 7 Interdisciplinary team of sociologists, economists and public policy analysts; Integrated in international network of scholars; Dedicated to high quality and new techniques; Experience in fieldwork; Sponsor and implement migration research in the region; Will do our own and support more research on topics not covered by GDN/ippr.

8. Timetable • Stakeholder interviews – May 2008 onwards • Household survey – Fall 2008 • Very preliminary results and the DOTM conference – January 2009 • Empirical evaluations, policy recommendations – 2009 • The DOTM conference, conclusions, datasets go public – January 2010

9. Stakeholder Interviews • In-depth interviews with experts in the field of migration. • The experts will represent government institutions, international organizations, private financial institutions, NGOs. • Interviews to be conducted starting from May, 2008.

10. Major issues: • Migration flows; • Brain drain/gain; • Remittances; • Emigrants’ investments; • Migration policy; • Other issues you are interested in.

11. Household survey Based on experts’ assessments, regions of the country will be selected; in each of these regions, a sample of households will be drawn which gives us a representative sample of households with: • Returned migrants; • Migrants who are still abroad; • Households with no migrants; To be conducted in September-October, 2008.

12. Major goals: • Collecting countrywide data on the experiences of the households affected by migration and compare to other households without migrants. • What other questions do you want to ask?

13. More data sources: • World Bank Remittances and Migration Survey; • Georgia Integrated Household Survey (IHS); • CRRC Data Initiative 2007; • National Bank of Georgia, official remittance data; • OSCE Use of Remittances Survey; • ILO Migration Survey. • Other sources that you know of?

14. Questions? • Suggestions? • Comments? • Recommendations?