Migration and the Future of Emerging Markets

The Emerging Markets Symposium (EMS) at Green Templeton College, Oxford was created in 2008 to consider issues of human welfare in emerging market countries and opportunities to address them. Focussing on the nexus of (i) the human life course and (ii) interventions by government, business and civil society, the EMS has considered issues of health, urbanization, education, gender, children, ageing, young people and the environment. Although migration has not been a central theme in these symposia, aspects of migration to, from and within emerging markets (e.g. transmigration of healthcare professionals, internal migration and urbanization, student migration, ageing and migration, internal and external migration of young people, migration and environmental health) have been discussed in some previous symposia.

In light of past discussions and against the background of the fact that emerging markets are facing and will continue to face urgent and critical migration-related issues (e.g. labour migration, forced migration, child migration, female migration, skill and technology transfers, remittances, human rights, national identity, and environmental change) the EMS devoted its ninth symposium to Migration and the Future of Emerging Markets.

The 2018 symposium focused on migration-related issues not because they are peculiar to emerging markets but because the growth, cohesion and stability of emerging markets is increasingly important to the world at large and because internal and external migration is an increasingly important determinant of human welfare in these countries.