Cool infographic: Visualizing the paths of migrating humans

chartt"The global flow of people" is a beautifully designed exploration of new data on migration flows between and within world regions for five-year periods between 1990 and 2010.

Click on a region to discover flows country-by-country. The study was produced by the Vienna Institute of Demography, and explores economic shifts, as well as geographic shifts -- in other words, how poor migrants gradually move up the economic ladder.

The bilateral flows between 196 countries are estimated from sequential stock tables. They are comparable across countries and capture the number of people who changed their country of residence over five-year periods. The estimates reflect migration transitions and thus cannot be compared to annual movements flow data published by United Nations and Eurostat.

The circular plot shows the estimates of directional flows between 123 countries that recorded a migration volume (immigration + emigration) of more than 100,000 people in at least two of the four time periods. Only flows containing at least 50,000 migrants are shown. The window that pops up when hovering over the plot indicates the absolute number of immigrants (total in) and emigrants (total out) over the five-year period.


Study also published in the journal Science, with free access: "Quantifying Global International Migration Flows."