Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development in Costa Rica
Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development in Costa Rica is the result of a project carried out by the Centro Centroamericano de Población (CCP) at the University of Costa Rica and the OECD Development Centre, in collaboration with the Dirección General de Migración y Extranjeria (DGME) and with support from the European Union. The project aimed to provide policy makers with evidence on the way migration influences specific sectors – the labour market, agriculture, education, investment and financial services and social protection and health – and, in turn, how sectoral policies affect migration. The report addresses four dimensions of the migration cycle: emigration, remittances, return and immigration.
The results of the empirical work confirm that migration contributes to the development of Costa Rica, but the potential of migration is not fully exploited. One explanation is that, despite the acknowledgement of the links between migration and development in recent legislation and policy, policy makers in Costa Rica do not sufficiently take migration into account in all respective policy areas. Costa Rica therefore needs to adopt a more coherent policy agenda to better integrate migration into development strategies, improve co-ordination mechanisms and strengthen international co-operation, to enhance the contribution of migration to development in the country.
Also available in: Spanish
Understanding the methodological framework used in Costa Rica
OECD Development Centre
In order to provide an empirical foundation to the analysis of the links between migration and policy, the Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development (IPPMD) project used three evidence-gathering tools: household surveys, community surveys, and interviews with representatives of public, private, non-government and international institutions to provide additional qualitative information about the migration context in Costa Rica.This chapter explains how the sampling framework was designed and implemented, as well as the statistical approaches used in this report to analyse the link between key policy sectors and emigration, immigration, return migration and remittances. The chapter also includes descriptive statistics drawn from the survey data. It outlines some key characteristics of the migrants in the sample as well as some background on immigration, emigration, remittances and return migration.
Also available in: Spanish