Continuity and Change in Human Transnational Mobility before and after the Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from a Global Dataset

This presentation draws on a version 2.0 of the Global Transnational Mobility Dataset created at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the EUI, which merges data from different sources to estimate the volume of cross-border population flows between all country dyads worldwide since the early 2000s. Version 1.0 (Recchi et al. 2019) – which covered the period 2011-2016 – showed an almost constant rise of international travel, but also two additional trends: the concentration of transnational movements along corridors and hubs and the regionalization of mobility. Version 2.0 of the dataset will include earlier years, thus expanding on the historical reading of cross-border mobility, as well as the post-Covid period (2022-2023), thus evidencing to what extent the pandemic paused the trend or rather reverted it. Preliminary analyses show that the first hypothesis (that is, reversal to the mean) prevails, but with some exceptions in certain world regions.