Complementarity between FDI and migration: Using the fall of the Berlin Wall as a natural experiment

The fragile international economic situation highlights challenges to international stability and global forecasting. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, exchanges between Western and Eastern European countries increased sharply. The integration of European economies taking place during the nineties was promoted by a significant flow of foreign direct investments (FDI) from Western to Eastern countries. Thereby, the end of the Cold War presents a natural experiment for testing the causal relationship existing between FDI and migration flows. This paper aims to understand to what extent west-east FDI flows could have fostered east-west migration flows since the nineties.