Response paper to the research report “The impact of labour migration on the demographic situation of Armenia”

Abstract

The impact of labour migration on the demographic situation of Armenia” is an interesting research report describing issues relating to the demographics of labor migration in Armenia in the last 40 years. The paper contains worthwhile discussions, rich statistical material and interesting conclusions. However, there are parts of the paper which deserve, in our opinion, to be contested. Also, several of the author’s judgments are not sufficiently objective and the paper neglected some important aspects, which we would like to bring up below. The methodology used by the author did not address the actual impact assessment of migration on the demographic situation and on demographic processes. The author described the demographic situation through assumptions. Therefore, we ack a realistic impact analysis in the paper. Another weak side of the paper is the fact that the author assesses the impact of labor migration on demographic processes (marriages, births, deaths…) from a quantitative perspective, neglecting qualitative effects. In the following, we comment on each section of the aforementioned paper.