CONFRONTING THE STATISTICS ON INTER-EUROP EAN MIGRATION - TOWARDS A GREATER HARMONIZATION

Each international migration stream can be enumerated twice: at the ti me of departure from the country of emigration and at the time of arri val in the country of immigration. In practice, errors in internationa l migration statistics are a major obstacle to the accurate analysis o f migration flows. In connection with the process of harmonization set in train by Eurostat several years ago, a method of correcting defect ive migration data is proposed here, which makes use of this double en umeration. The method is applied to available data in a preliminary an alysis. The correction factors presented here through this mathematica l approach should turn out to be useful in more than one respect: to i lluminate substantial problems of incompatibility of migration data an d to follow the progress of the harmonization of those data.