Assessing transnational human mobility on a global scale

Abstract

In this chapter, we estimate human mobility between countries worldwide on the basis of global statistics on tourism and air passenger traffic. Adjusting and merging the data from these two sources through a simple set of procedures enabled us to counter some of their individual limitations. The resulting open-access dataset, which covers more than 15 billion estimated trips during the years 2011 to 2016, promises to be a comprehensive new resource on transnational human mobility worldwide. In this chapter, we illustrate the data characteristics and transformations adopted in creating this dataset. We explore potential applications and discuss the remaining caveats. We conclude with several lessons from our endeavor that might be useful for researchers who wish to engage in similar data-merging procedures.