It will be politically difficult to liberalize international migration without protecting host-country workers. Professor Martin Ravallion explores in this work the scope for efficiently managing migration using a competitive market for work permits. Host-county workers would have the option of renting out their citizenship work permit for a period of their choice, while foreigners purchase time-bound work permits. Aggregate labor supply need not rise in the host country. However, total output would rise and workers would see enhanced social protection. Simulations for the US and Mexico suggest that the new market would attract many skilled migrants, boosting GDP and reducing poverty in the US.
Martin Ravallion holds the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown in 2013 he was Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group.
Professor Ravallion’s main research interests over the last 30 years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on this topic, and he has written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including five books and 250 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes.
He is the ex-President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Non-Resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development and a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development. Professor Ravallion was awarded, among various prizes and awards, the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association in 2012; the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation, Madrid in 2016; and an Honorary Doctorate in Economics by the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 2018.