Social issues in the management of labour migration in Asia and the Pacific

Any discussion of the mobility of labour across borders in a region as huge and complex as Asia is bound to do no more than provide a sketch of a few idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. With a combined population of 3.6 billion, the Asian and Pacific region accounts for almost three fifths of the world’s total population. The region’s land mass and innumerable islands have been partitioned into over 50 independent States, dividing people usually along lines of ethnicity, common language, religion and shared recent history. Each one is pursuing independent national policies for political and economic development with varying success, creating in the process differentials in standards of living within and between States that often drive people to move. Those differentials have been magnified by the forces of globalization which have spurred the economies of the region, but favouring the open and politically-stable countries more than others.