And several years back, I read a newspaper feature about some of NZ’s redneck element – think Allan Titford or Kyle Chapman – who had migrated to QLD’s Sunshine Coast. So emigration to Oz isn’t always a bad thing – Sir Joh is perhaps the best possible example. Not so good for QLD though.

Indeedy. Life-cycle effects and inherent heterogeneity in preferences – country of birth is an inherent characteristic of the individual as well!

Sure, I just thought you summarised it as income differences. If he just means ‘all differences’ then it’s hard to disagree!

Of course, the eqm isn’t usually zero flow because of the life-cycle effects, as you say. Perfect for a system dynamics model, really…

Unless we expect everyone to leave the country there must be some convergence to an equilibrium – small shocks could lead to large changes (and therefore significant shifts in flows), but I find everyone leaving a country not plausible.

More importantly, sounds like an interesting book!

Its not clear whether its a linear relationship – it can get too hot! QLD has a lot of NZers for example, but less so in WA. On my eyeball econometrics it looked to be as much a function of economic opportunities (good job prospects in mining, construction, distribution, retail and hospo), distance from NZ and the size of the diaspora…

He goes into some detail about whether the migration reaches some equilibrium or if it is an explosive track. Well beyond my econometrics – but really fascinating.

Do you think its part of the economic outcomes argument, broadly defined? In this case, one of the goods they consume is access to culture and places in Europe?

The “diaspora” narrative is one of transition between equilibrium for the stock of New Zealand residents in another country. When there is some shock that leads to more people heading over to Aussies, this leads to more people going over in the future, but unless our view is that everyone is going to move to Australia this process must eventually peter out.

The wage gap, non-pecuniary differences, the temperature, and legal systems are all factors that act as primitives for our “stock level” – so a shock to these will, in turn, lead to a process where the disapora is important for discussing the transition. Also this implies that the SR and LR effect of shocks to these primitives will be different.

This is also complicated by the fact that these are life cycle decisions etc etc.

WIthin this framework, there are a lot of cool empirical questions we can ask. And it also becomes more evident that the magnitude of migration changes due to policy shocks are less self-evident, or even easy to quantify, than at first meets the eye. Fun!