Migration from French Overseas Departments to Metropolitan France: What We Can Learn about a State Policy from the Censuses, 1962–1999A word from the jury president

A total of 17 articles entered this year’s competition for the Young Author’s Prize organized by Population. Most of the papers received were considered to be of good quality. The texts were very varied, reflecting the most important current problems in population studies and the diverse centres of interest of young researchers around the world. Authors from four continents – Europe, Africa, Asia, and America – submitted a total of eight articles in English and nine in French. This shows the strong influence of the journal in the English-speaking world. Out of the 17 papers, seven were written by men and ten by women. Many of the themes correspond to the traditional areas of demography: mortality, fertility, nuptiality, and migration. However, the fields of interest have been extended to morbidity, religion, reproductive health, youth, gender violence, among others. The papers show the use of modern and powerful statistical techniques applied to demography, and many of them combine quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The third edition of the Young Author’s Prize was organized as follows. Following an initial round of assessment, each of the remaining six articles was sent to two external reviewers. The jury members then examined all the articles and the reviewers’ reports. The winner was selected at a final meeting on 5 February 2018.

On behalf of the jury, I would like to congratulate the winner, Marine Haddad, for her article: “Migration from French Overseas Departments to Metropolitan France: What We Can Learn about a State Policy from the Censuses, 1962–1999”. Marine Haddad is currently a PhD student in sociology at Sciences Po, Observatoire sociologique du changement. Using data from population censuses conducted between 1962 and 1999, her paper examines the effect of public policies on migration between metropolitan France and the overseas départements (DOM). She shows that the Office for DOM Migration (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer, Bumidom) accelerated the growth in migration flows over the period, leading to a widening of the socioeconomic differences between the DOMs and metropolitan France.

This is a clearly presented, well-written paper, and I hope you will enjoy reading the article by the 2018 prize winner.

Composition of the jury

The jury of the third edition of the young Author’s Prize was chaired by Manuel Ordorica Mellado (El Colegio de México) and was composed of Carlo-Giovani Camarda (INED, Paris, France), Christophe Guilmoto (CEPED/IRD, France), Karel Neels (University of Antwerp, Belgium), and Aline Désesquelles (INED, Paris, France) as voting members, and Olivia Samuel (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, France) and Anne Solaz (INED, Paris, France) as non-voting members.