Leaving, returning: reconstructing trends in international migration with five questions in household surveys.

Data on international migration trends are crucially lacking, especially in developing countries. The lack of basic information on migration is in sharp contrast with the increasing importance of migration in the population and development agenda.
Demographic surveys offer unique opportunities to collect original data on international migration. A few simple questions in relatively small-scale surveys can be used to reconstruct migration trends with a reasonable degree of precision, and can greatly improve the knowledge of levels, trends, and patterns of international migration. The objectives of this paper are threefold: (1) To describe the data and method used to reconstruct trends in first departure and returns.
(2) to reconstruct trends in migration in Senegal, Ghana and DR Congo with data from the MAFE project , and (3) to assess the quality of these estimates.