Migration and business cycles

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1736236210

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-111544

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Jerome, Harry

Title:: Migration and business cycles

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: National Bureau of Economic Research

Year of publication:: 1926

Scope:: 256 S.

Digitisation:: 2020

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter V. The pre-war quarter century : 1890-1914

Collection:: Economics Books

119 MIGRATION AND BUSINESS CYCLES data available makes a precise answer to this question impossible, particularly for the earlier years. However, the available estimates are probably accurate enough to establish within reasonable limits of error the volume relation between migration and unemployment. Professor Hornell Hart has made an estimate of the numbers unemployed in non-agricultural occupations by months from1902 to 1917, which will serve for a preliminary comparison of the volume of immigration and the estimated volume of unemployment. There is, as suggested above, necessarily a considerable margin of error in these estimates and consequently they should be looked upon, not as giving a refined measure of the volume of unemploy- ment, but as an approximation probably sufficiently close to the truth to permit rough comparisons to be made with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Upon what basis should the volume of immigration and employ- ment be compared? Immigration is Appropriately,Compared with Changes in the Volume of Employment. Immigration represents an addition to the supply of labor over a period of time, and, as to numerical volume, is logically comparable, not so much with the amount of unemployment existing at a given time, as with the change in the number unemployed over the same period of time. This principle may be illustrated by making the assumption that the domestic labor supply is kept regularly em- ployed, with no seasonal or cyclical unemployment. Under such conditions, any changes in the volume of employment would rep- resent additions to or subtractions from the labor supply by migra- tion. Thus, with migratory workers as the sole fluctuating element in employment, there would be perfect correlation between the fluctuations in migration and those in employment. An increase of 100,000 in the number employed would be accompanied by a net immigration of 100,000; a decrease of 50,000 in employment, by a net emigration of 50,000. But under conditions as they actually exist, employment changes do not correlate perfectly in numbers with migration, and the dis- crepancy represents either a failure of the immigrants to obtain employment or a change in the number of domestic workers em- ployed. If the net migration is always less than the employment change, but in the same direction—for example, if an excess of 5For a somewhat fuller description of this estimate, see Chapter III. il

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