Knowledge, Migration and Countries of Muslim World – Spatial Impacts and Prospects

The article presents an empirical examination of the spatial dependence of emigrants and immigrants on the indicators of a knowledge based economy. The article is motivated by a knowledge gap among countries of the Muslim world, worsening demographic conditions, the growing importance of knowledge in the world economy and geographical proximity. The existence of spatial distribution and autocorrelation among migrants is examined through the spatial lag and the spatial error models. Although one can assume that the presence of both – the number of emigrants and the number of immigrants have similar preconditions, with slight variables - emigrants tend to indicate the dependence on the nearest neighbours. Therefore studying of emigrants among the countries of Muslim world is done better through spatial models and is more appropriate than the estimate regression coefficients through ordinary least square regression. When looking at the knowledge economy, findings also suggest that the number of internet users and the number of journal articles influence the number of emigrants (and also number of immigrants). The human desire to leave a country is also driven by other factors, for example tariff and nontariff barriers, average years of schooling, industrial production growth rate and the number of computers in each country.