Spatial analysis of foreign migration in Poland in 2012 using geographically weighted regression

Migration has a principal influence on countries' population changes. Thus, the issues connected with the causes, effects and directions of people's movements are a common topic of political and academic discussions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the spatial distribution of officially registered foreign migration in Poland in 2012. GIS tools are implemented for data visualization and statistical analysis. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is used to estimate the impact of unemployment, wages and other socioeconomic variables on the foreign emigration and immigration measure. GWR provides spatially varying estimates of model parameters that can be presented on a map, giving a useful graphical representation of spatially varying relationships.