MOBILE - Mobility Law Open Lab with Ettore Recchi

Graph from Ettore

The Global Structure of Transnational Human Mobility (1995-2022): Continuity, Change, and Inequality

Presenter: Ettori Recchi is Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. He is also a part-time professor at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, where he received his PhD in Social and Political Sciences.

Presentation: Despite its importance in a globalized world, there is only little systematic information about human travel between countries that considers both migration and other kinds of mobility. This paper introduces new estimates of the volume of migratory and non-migratory human travel across state borders on a planetary scale between 1995 and 2022.

The estimates integrate information from three major sources: tourism data, air passenger data, and migration data. They reveal that total transnational mobility increased from 5.29 billion trips in 1995 to 10.66 billion in 2019, largely outpacing global population growth and telling a story of continued globalization in that period – or, more precisely, of regional integration, since four out of five cross-border travels occur within the same world region.

Across the board, migration flows constitute a tiny and decreasing fraction of international travel; less than 1% worldwide and as low as 0,12% in Europe. Amidst the sustained growth in volume, the global network of cross-border human mobility has experienced slow ‘tectonic shifts’ in some of its major clusters, while maintaining a stable configuration in others.

By computing Gini coefficients of international mobility rates, the findings show that global mobility inequality is substantially higher than global income inequality, but slightly declining in the study period of our paper.

The presented paper is authored by Ettori Recchi, Tobias Grohmann (EUI), and Luca J. Bernasconi (EUI).

Time: 12 September 2025 14:00-15:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

Online participation

For online participation, please contact our intern  Kamille Sennels Munch at xdm242@jur.ku.dk to receive a Zoom link.