This repository contains empirical data and analysis on Northern Irish migration that complements a recent article published by the Scottish government on migration policy. The article looks for a regionally tailored system of migration for Scotland. They find the economic cost of reduced migration, particularly due to the impact of Brexit, would be in the region of almost £5bn per year by 2040. The same analysis should be done for Northern Ireland.
The purpose of this repositorty is to produce a number of models, charts and figures that complement the Scottish study for the case of Northern Ireland.
All data used in this study can be found in the data directory of this repository. Specifically, we pull from three main data sources:
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Long-term migration statistics are collected from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA).
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UK-wide regional data and migration variants are collected from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
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County and parliamentary-level map data for Northern Ireland are gathered from Open Data Northern Ireland (ODNI).
A complete list of all data sources can be found here.
We use R as the primary language for performing econometric and statistical analysis. To reproduce the figures and analysis, base R needs to be installed. Moreover, a small number of R packages are required to run the analysis. These can be installed by running the requirements.R script, which can be found at the root of the MigrationNI directory. Therefore, from the terminal:
cd <path/to/MigrationNI>
Rscript requirements.R
Note that this installation script is only written for Ubuntu.
You can run the full analysis and generate the figures using the main.R script. This can be run within the R enviornment itself, or alternatively can be run from the terminal with the following commands:
cd <path/to/MigrationNI>
Rscript main.R
The resulting charts and figures can be found in the figures/editied directory. Here, you will find another README file which documents each figure.
A presentation was delivered to the CBI Northern Ireland on the impact of Brexit to the Northern Irish economy. This provided a brief overview of the impact of Brexit on three important economic areas: migration, trade and investment. A PDF and an ODP version of the presentation can be found in the presentation directory.
Please contact me with regards any issues or queries that you have.