Journal of Economic Cooperation and Development, 35, 4 (2014), 159-186
Knowledge, Migration and Countries of Muslim World – Spatial
Impacts and Prospects
Ahmed Tarjam Ali Bisher, Abdalbast Saleh Omer Daya
and Martina Prochádzková1
The article presents an empirical examination of the spatial dependence of
emigrants and immigrants on the indicators of a knowledge based economy.
The article is motivated by a knowledge gap among countries of the Muslim
world, worsening demographic conditions, the growing importance of
knowledge in the world economy and geographical proximity. The existence of
spatial distribution and autocorrelation among migrants is examined through
the spatial lag and the spatial error models. Although one can assume that the
presence of both – the number of emigrants and the number of immigrants
have similar preconditions, with slight variables - emigrants tend to indicate
the dependence on the nearest neighbours. Therefore studying of emigrants
among the countries of Muslim world is done better through spatial models and
is more appropriate than the estimate regression coefficients through ordinary
least square regression. When looking at the knowledge economy, findings also
suggest that the number of internet users and the number of journal articles
influence the number of emigrants (and also number of immigrants). The
human desire to leave a country is also driven by other factors, for example
tariff and nontariff barriers, average years of schooling, industrial production
growth rate and the number of computers in each country.
1
Department of Regional Science and Management, Faculty of Economics,
Technical University of Košice, Slovakia, E-mail: [email protected],
[email protected]