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Sky-high migration of workers from East to West added about $2-billion to Canada's economy last year, according to a ground-breaking study to be released today by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.

Interprovincial migration also boosted productivity at a national level, with significant gains in provinces with net in-migration, compared to slim gains for those provinces with net out-migration.

“The [numbers] show that there's been a massive increase in the gains, both from productivity and from employment in the past few years,” co-author Andrew Sharpe said. “Labour flexibility and mobility are paying off in terms of output.”

The study looked at migration's effect on the economy between 1987 and 2006. For most of those years, while there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between provinces, the effects on the economy in terms of output and productivity were negligible.

But as the commodities boom took off in Alberta and British Columbia in the past couple of years, migration picked up, and so did the economic impact, the study shows. Migration boosted the country's gross domestic product by 5.8 per cent in 2006, compared with an average gain of just 2.6 per cent over the decade, the study shows.

The study, Mr. Sharpe said, “puts some numbers to the anecdotes about Alberta.”

Part of the economic gains comes from the fact that the migrants are young, well-educated, and are moving to find ways to put their skills to good use, the study says. It points to findings that interprovincial migrants saw their earnings rise by 9.4 per cent over two years, compared with a 4.8-per-cent raise for home-stickers.

All told, the study shows that the oil boom has favoured the Western economy while the Eastern economy flags, but it is not a zero-sum game.

By 2006, interprovincial migration was at a record high, with almost 380,000 people on the move in Canada, or 1.14 per cent of the population.

But after all the moving around was said and done, the only provinces that recorded positive net migration last year were Alberta and British Columbia.

Ontario, with its sagging manufacturing sector and rising unemployment rate, had the largest net outflow of migrants last year, losing 33,793 people.

That's the opposite of the migration picture of 1987, when low oil prices sent people fleeing to buoyant Ontario.

Economists and the Bank of Canada have often talked of migration as the best way for Canada to mitigate uneven regional growth, saying a flexible labour force is the best way to deal with a slow economy in the East and a boom in the West.

Today's study shows that workers have indeed moved to take advantage of the boom, and that their movement has benefited the Canadian economy as a whole, by adding output worth almost $2-billion in 2006 alone.

The economy benefits partly because migration to the West soaks up unemployed people from the East.

But the economy also benefits from added productivity, because migrants are generally moving from low-productivity provinces to high-productivity provinces, Mr. Sharpe added.

The gains are not spread evenly, however.

Alberta's economic output jumped by $4.6-billion in 2006, and British Columbia's output grew $238.4-million. Ontario saw migration out of the province drain more than $1.4-billion of economic output away.

Alberta has seen migration add to its economic output every year over the past decade, while British Columbia and Ontario have flitted back and forth between winning and losing from migration.

Similarly, provinces with net in-migration saw their productivity climb rapidly especially between 2004 and 2006, while provinces with net out-migration saw little in terms of productivity gain.

On average, B.C. and Alberta saw productivity gains worth $122,698 per net worker gained from migration. Provinces who lost population due to migration, however, saw average productivity gains of $82,955 per worker. That means there was a productivity gap of $39,743 between population-gainers and population-losers.