Developing the MIAG framework

One of the first things that the MIAG team did was a comprehensive review of existing conceptualisations and frameworks, including the two you looked at in the last activity.

Because so much work already existed and was being used extensively in policy circles, we wanted to see if any of it might already align with the aims of the project. A key gap in the IG literature is a lack of academic attention, so rather than reinvent the wheel, MIAG wanted to build on what might already be being used in policy and practice.

Two of the observations that the MIAG team got from the review that became central to the project’s framework were as follows:

• The need to sensitise our conceptualisation of inclusive growth to migration: The review showed that virtually all existing framings did not account for population mobility and migration as a factor for growth. One possible reason is that most IG frameworks take the nation as the main unit of analysis and there is a tendency for national growth policies to be divorced from immigration policy. Hence, migration becomes an overlooked variable in IG debates.
• Trying to unpack a more comprehensive picture of what ‘non-income’ means: The review highlighted a clear trend towards frameworks focusing on indicators that were more skewed toward still measuring growth in conventional terms – as income and financial growth. Much of the existing literature was still struggling to get to grips with developing a comprehensive set of indicators that would be able to start making connections between inclusion and growth, and measuring it in broader political or social terms.

Figure 1.3 is the finalised conceptual and analytical framework developed by MIAG. The characteristics and determinants component will be explained in more detail in Week 2, when you look at the migration and development debates, but in short, each of the four teams developed an extensive country report detailing the history and profile of migrants, and how they connect to the economy and growth. These reports were a foundation upon which the study could build the empirical case for investigating particular migrant groups and sectors. With regard to the framework then filtering down to our indicators for IG outcomes, MIAG took the standardised approach of separating income from non-income. The former are pretty straightforward and need little explanation, but the rationale for the less tangible measures were based on considering how wider social and political development and growth may be happening but needing to be able to find ways to make causal links to migration.

Figure 1.3 Building and analytical framework for IG.

Having considered how IG is understood, the next section will look behind the definitions at some of the key debates informing them. To do this, each of these four broader categorisations of ‘non-income-related’ growth were broken down into two or three classifications that can connect to migrant business activity (Table 1.1).

Each of the bullet points in Table 1.1 are themselves broad categories, but they allowed MIAG to introduce a layer of granularity to the non-income dimensions of IG that had largely been missing. As you will see in later weeks of the course, we unpacked each of these further into a more expansive set of growth indicators that the team used as the basis for interrogating the data across all of the collection methods, from the secondary data to the survey and semi-structured interviews, allowing the team to build up a more complex picture of the links between migration and IG.