Determinants of migration from ASEAN-3 into Malaysia

Migration theory advances several reasons for migration, which can be categorised into two groups: push factors and pull factors. Push factors include the economic performance of the emigrating country, whereas the pull factors include performance in the destination country. The latter include gross domestic product, job creation, the unemployment rate, education level, and wage rate. This paper examines the determinants of immigration from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-3, namely Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, into Malaysia. The analysis is based on panel data of 1990-2008 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach. The results show that the main determinants of this migration flow are the real wage ratio among the ASEAN-3 and Malaysia, the unemployment rate in the source countries, and the real exchange rate ratio between the ASEAN-3 and Malaysia.