Vietnam should include migration in its national and human development strategies, according to the UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report (HDR) delivered by the UNDP’s Deputy Country Director Christopher Bahuet at a workshop in Hanoi on October 5.

Speaking at the two-day workshop, entitled “Migration, Development and Poverty Reduction”, the UNDP representative referred to migration and the benefits that better migration policies could have on human development.

Inequality is a major reason that leads to migration and the majority of people are not migrating from developing countries to developed ones but relocating within their own country, he said, adding that out of nearly 1 billion migrants in the world, 740 million are domestic migrants, quadrupling the figure of international migrants.

Since 1960, the migration rate in the world has remained unchanged, at 3 percent of the global population.

According to Bahuet, the HDR also proposes a long-term and more ambitious outlook to attract more benefits from migration and reform measures such as simplifying procedures, allowing unskilled workers to find jobs abroad, ensuring migrants’ basic rights, reducing the costs relating to migration and generating more benefits from the flow of domestic migrants./.