Estimating transnational human mobility on a global scale

Abstract

We devise an integrated estimate of country-to-country cross-border human mobility on the basis of global statistics on tourism and air passenger traffic. The joint use of these two sources allows us to (a) test for their relative contribution, and (b) correct for their limitations to the estimate of global mobility by combining them. The two sources are adjusted and merged following simple procedures. The resulting dataset, which covers more than 15 billion estimated trips over the years 2011 to 2016, promises to be a systematic and comprehensive resource on transnational human mobility worldwide. In this paper, we illustrate the data characteristics and transformations adopted in creating this dataset. First applications are explored, and its remaining limits are discussed.