Global migration topology analysis and modeling of bilateral flow network 2006–2010

¹ Architecture and Town Planning Faculty, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - 32000 Haifa, Israel
² Solid State Institute and Physics Department, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - 32000 Haifa, Israel

^(a) idan.prt@gmail.com

Received: 21 April 2016
Accepted: 6 July 2016

Abstract

Migration is one of the most dramatic and vast human processes in modern times. Migration is defined as people that leave their home and home-land and move to a new country. In this research we address the pattern of this massive human movement with the tools of network theory. The undirected global flow migration network (2006–2010) was identified as an exclusive disassortative network which combines two types of defined groups of large- and small-degree (D) countries with betweeness (Be) of Be∼D³. This structure was modeled and simulated with synthetic networks of similar characteristics as the global flow migration network, and the results suggest that small-degree nodes have the topology of random networks, but the dominant part of the large-degree hubs controls this topology and shapes the network into an ultra-small world. This exclusive topology and the difference of the global flow migration network from scale-free and from Erdös-Rényi networks may be a result of two defined and different topologies of large- and small-degree countries.