Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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conversation. You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've

ever done going back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org, we'd love to hear

from you. Today is July 12, 2013, and my guest is Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the

Center for Global Development, where he leads the migration and development initiative. He

has taught at Georgetown University, been a visiting scholar at New York University, and

he has lived and worked in Columbia, Brazil, and Turkey. Michael, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you so much. I'm a big fan, and it's great to be here. Thanks. Our topic for today

is world poverty, and how aid and migration might play a role in reducing that poverty. We're

going to draw on two academic papers you've written on these topics, and try to weave them

together a bit. I want to start with aid. There are studies that find that aid increases

growth, and presumably reduces poverty. There are studies that find that aid doesn't increase

growth. I assume there are studies that find that aid actually decreases growth. What are

some of the problems in those studies in terms of measurement? What are the challenges

with trying to measure the impact of aid on growth, which are quite numerous, I assume?

Yes. First of all, I appreciate this framing of the issue. I think that we'll be going from

the less important to the more important topic. I just want to make it clear why I say that

right now globally for an aid is a little over $120 billion a year. If I've got the latest number

right, just the portion of migrants, international migrants, earnings that they send home is about

four times that, and that doesn't even account the gains to themselves and to the destination

...