A Network-Based Measure of the Socio-Economic Roots of the Migration Flows

This paper provides a unified view for defining a measure of the reasons behind migration flows whose nature is of social and economic type. To this aim, worldwide migration flows are here presented in the context of complex network and a related socio-economic indicator is conceptualized. The ingredients of the indicator also include the economic strengths of the countries and how they behave in terms of community structure, where "community" has to be intended in the sense of how countries interact in terms of immigration and emigration. Empirical analyses on a wide set of real data validate the theoretical framework, hence giving a paramount quantitative view of the roots of the worldwide migration flows.