In response to surging immigration pressure in Europe and the United States, Western policymakers advocate foreign aid as a means to fight the `root causes' of irregular migration. This article provides the first global evidence of the effects of aid on migration preferences, migration flows, potential underlying mechanisms, both in the short and longer term. We combine newly geocoded data on World Bank aid project allocation at the subnational level over the period 2008--2019 with exceptionally rich survey data from a sample of almost one million individuals across the entire developing world and data on migration and asylum seeker flows to high-income countries. Employing two distinct causal estimation strategies, we show that in the short term (after the announcement of a World Bank project and within two years after project disbursement), foreign aid improves individual expectations about the future and trust in national institutions in aid-receiving regions, which translate into reduced individual migration preferences and asylum-seeker flows. In the longer term (between three and five years after disbursement), foreign aid fosters improvements in individual welfare through poverty reduction and income increases, resulting in larger regular migration to high-income countries. Our findings show that aid can cause a short-lived reduction in migration aspirations, except in fragile Sub-Saharan African contexts where aid appears ineffective. In contrast, foreign aid enhances individual capabilities over the longer term, contributing to greater regular migration, consistent with the `mobility transition' theory.

Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the common empirical approaches for studying immigration preferences. We propose a simple theoretical model that combines the dominant perspectives on attitudes toward immigration, differentiating between preferences for whom to admit and preferences for how many immigrants to admit. We collect new experimental and survey data in Uganda and Senegal to empirically investigate our model's main components in a heavily understudied context. Similar to results from high-income settings, perceptions of immigrants' impacts on the host economy and culture drive attitudes, whereas potential labor market competition is irrelevant. In contrast to high-income settings, however, immigrants' economic effects are perceived more positively in Uganda and Senegal. Our model and empirical results highlight that perceptions of immigration are central to all widely used measures of immigration preferences.

Migration aspirations lie at the heart of self-selection into migration. In this paper, we study three questions: How do individual, household, origin-country, and destination-country characteristics interact? What factors are most influential? Who wants to leave in what context? We develop a new stylized model which integrates insights from the recently established aspirations-capabilities framework into standard utility maximization. We jointly investigate destination country factors (income and legal status), journey factors (costs and risks involved), and origin country factors (income, economic trends, and quality of public goods) using a conjoint choice experiment with 2708 participants in Uganda and Senegal. Our results show that all these dimensions significantly affect migration decision-making. However, the most important dimensions are the legal status and the risk of dying on the journey. Legal migration opportunities are even more influential for individuals that are content with their income situation at home. In line with the aspirations-capabilities framework, we show that higher life aspirations come with a higher willingness to migrate.

 The use of FX intervention (FXI) is preceded by policymakers’ institutional decisions. We show that FXI activity increases with the choice of more rigid exchange rate regimes, larger official reserve assets (relative to GDP), and reserves held in a form easing their use for FXI, which we demonstrate by developing an FXI “readiness” index. These institutional decisions well explain but can hardly predict FXI. Despite their costs, our findings show that policymakers have expanded FXI preparations over the last two decades and that less democratic countries tend to be more prepared. 

We investigates the impact of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) on migration aspirations within African countries. The study provides a cross-country quantitative analysis of the EUTF’s influence on migration aspirations. Using sub-national data from the EUTF’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning System (MLS) and individual-level data from the Gallup World Poll, we employ a difference-in-differences approach. Our findings indicate that there is evidence of a reduction in migration aspirations. We disaggregate effects by gender and point out possible mechanisms, which point to improvements in the satisfaction with the standard of living and the availability of basic services being particularly relevant. This research advances the debate on the role of development aid in shaping migration decisions and offers policy-relevant insights into the effectiveness of the EUTF’s multifaceted interventions.

We present a novel approach to mapping the global middle class using a geographically disaggregated datasets and implement it for the case of Africa. By integrating survey-based income data with geospatial indicators such as infrastructure, GDP, and nightlight intensity, we classify and predict middle-class populations at a granular 96 km² hexagonal grid level. Using machine learning models we extrapolate estimated middle-class shares and population sizes in regions not covered by surveys, offering unprecedented spatial detail. This work lays the groundwork for future analyses of middle-class growth and its impact. The dataset will be released with the paper.