Research Project T03

THESIM: Towards Harmonised European Statistics on International Migration

Project Manager for the CEFMR part: Marek Kupiszewski

The project has been funded by the European Commission through the Sixth Framework Programme and executed by a research consortium led by the Centre d'étude de gestion démographique pour les administrations publiques of the Université Catholique de Louvain.

In order to reach the objective of harmonisation, the international migration data of all 25 EU Member States have been investigated in several directions:

1. to compare definitions and concepts related to international migration;
2. to analyse available data in order to see what the data already reveals and where are the main problems in terms of reliability and comparability;
3. to integrate data on asylum with data on flows and stocks in order to get the more reliable information on de facto international migration within each country;
4. to describe and analyse all efforts done on bilateral and international levels in order to improve the situation and to identify impact of low reliability and lack of comparability on policy implementation;
5. to propose practical recommendations on the way to improve the situation after discussion with all potential data providers and data users for migration policy development.

More details about the project can be found on the official website of THESIM. The outcome of the project is available in the book THESIM: Towards Harmonised European Statistics on International Migration, edited by M. Poulain, N. Perrin and A. Singleton. The book was published in 2006 by Presses Universitaires de Louvain. The contributions of the CEFMR staff include a chapter on the data on international migration flows, as well as five country reports, all listed in the publications section. Selected results are also presented in CEFMR Working papers 5/2005, 7/2005 and 8/2005.