Replication Data for: The ties that bind: The role of migrants in the uneven geography of international telephone traffic (with Richard Perkins), Global Networks,13 (1), 2013, pp. 79-100

Recent work suggests that migrants have been a major driving force in the dramatic growth of international telephony over recent decades, accounting for large rises in telephone calls between countries with strong immigrant/emigrant connections. Yet, the existing literature has done a poor job of evaluating the substantive importance of migrants in explaining large disparities in levels of bilateral voice traffic observed between different countries. It has also failed to go very far in examining how domestic and relational factors moderate (namely amplify or attenuate) the influence of migrant stocks on international calling. Our contribution addresses these gaps in the literature. For a sample, which includes a far larger number of countries than previous studies, we show that, together with shorter-term visitors, bilateral migrant stocks emerge as the relational variable with one of the substantively largest influences over cross-national patterns of telephone calls. We also find that the effect of bilateral migrant stocks on inter-country telephone traffic is greater where the country pairs are richer and more spatially distant from one another.

近期研究表明，近几十年来国际电信业务的爆发式增长，移民群体乃是核心驱动因素之一；移民与侨民联系紧密的国家之间的电话通话量大幅攀升，正源于此。然而现有研究却未能充分评估移民在解释不同国家间双边语音通话流量（bilateral voice traffic）差异时的实质重要性，同时也未能深入探讨国内因素与关系型因素如何调节（即放大或弱化）移民存量（migrant stocks）对国际通话的影响。本研究旨在弥补现有文献中的这些研究空白。相较于既往研究，本研究的样本覆盖了更多国家，结果显示，双边移民存量与短期访客一道，成为对跨国电话通话格局具有实质影响力最为显著的关系型变量之一。此外我们还发现，当两国经济体更发达、彼此地理距离越遥远时，双边移民存量对跨国通话流量的影响效应越强。