The 10 billion travel world: Continuity and change in global transnational mobility (1995–2022)

Abstract

Notwithstanding its size and importance in a globalized world, there is little systematic information about the volume and direction of human travel that considers both migration and other kinds of mobility. This article introduces new estimates of the volume of migratory and non-migratory human travel across country borders worldwide between 1995 and 2022. Building on pioneering work by Recchi et al. (2019, Estimating Transnational Human Mobility on a Global Scale), the estimates integrate information from three major sources: tourism data, air passenger data, and migration data. Our estimates reveal that total transnational mobility increased from 5.29 billion trips in 1995 to 10.66 billion in 2019, largely outpacing global population growth and telling a story of continued globalization in that period—or, more precisely, of regional integration, since four out of five cross-border travels occur within the same world region. Across the board, migration (i.e., travel followed by residence change) constitutes a tiny and decreasing fraction of international travel; less than 1% worldwide and as low as .12% in Europe. Amidst the sustained growth in volume, the global network of human cross-border mobility has experienced slow “tectonic shifts” in some of its major clusters, while maintaining a stable configuration in others.