By TIOL News Service

PARIS, OCT 16, 2016: WHEN the United Nations’ General Assembly welcomed world leaders to New York City in September, it also, hosted a high-level summit on refugees and migration for the first time in its history. The summit highlighted the particular need for policies to realise migration’s development potential.

By integrating migration, including forced displacement, into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, heads of states and governments acknowledged that migration needs to work for development and that development needs to work for migration, while taking full account of potential negative impacts.

With the number of international migrants doubling in the past quarter-century, reaching 244 million in 2015, increased mobility offers both development opportunities and new challenges for policy makers.

Even though migration contributes to the development of countries of origin and destination, most countries do not fully exploit its potential. To enhance the contribution of migration to development, home and host countries need to adopt a more coherent policy agenda to better integrate migration into development strategies, improve co-ordination mechanisms and strengthen co-operation at the international level.

These topics were at the heart of today’s dialogue co-hosted by the OECD Development Centre and the European Union Thematic Programme on Migration and Asylum, which centred around their joint empirically-based report on the Interrelations between public policies, migration and development (IPPMD) conducted in ten partner countries-Armenia, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Haiti, Morocco and the Philippines - between 2013 and 2016.

The project addresses four dimensions of the migration cycle - emigration, remittances, return and immigration - based on fieldwork. It provides policy makers with evidence on the way migration influences specific sectors – labour market, agriculture, education, investment and financial services, and social protection and health – and, in turn, how sectoral policies affect migration with a special focus on South-South migration.

The event, which served as a platform for policy dialogue, discussed the findings and concrete policies that can help enhance the contribution of migration to the development of both countries of origin and destination.

High-profile leaders, including Alexander Baramidze, First Deputy Minister of Justice of Georgia, and Yvan Rodriguez, Vice Minister of Economy, Planning and Development of the Dominican Republic, gathered at the OECD headquarters in Paris to share their views and experiences with other country representatives, policy makers, migration experts and representatives from academia, civil society and multilateral organisations.

Further reflecting their strong co-operation, the European Commission and the OECD Development Centre have been exploring ways for policy makers to best design effective long-term policies that are essential for leveraging positive development outcomes in key fields such as youth inclusion and social protection systems in low and middle-income countries.

The OECD Development Centre also chairs the Thematic Working Group on Policy and Institutional Coherence in the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD), in collaboration with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme. This group aims to improve policy and institutional coherence for migration and development.