emigration and rising wages in myanmar evidence from mon state whether and how immigration affects labour markets is a hotly debated and widely studied topic by contrast the converse question of how emigration impacts labour markets in the source economy has

the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program conducted in 2002 in tonga the study observed the impact of migration lottery program on the remaining household members of tongan emigrants on the individual and intra household level income falls rapidly by 22 to 25 percent with a rise in remittances failing to offset a large fall in labor earnings ownership of livestock durable and access to financial services is lower for the remaining household members diets change to be less nutritious and more rice and root crops immigration has a negative impact on household size there is no significant impact of migration on labor supply for men nor women funding for the study derived from the world bank stanford university the waikato management school and mardsen fund

remittances schooling and child labor in mexico abstract this paper studies the effects of remittances from the u s on child labor and school attendance in recipient mexican households we identify these effects using the impact of the 2008 2009 u s recession on remittance receipts the methodology employed is a differences in differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never recipient households to avoid possible selection problems we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group we find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance

to have and have not international migration poverty and inequality in algeria in this paper using an original survey we analyze the distributional impact of international migration across two regions of algeria a semi parametric descriptive analysis is complemented with a parametric model remittances do not significantly change the gini coefficient in nearly any of the counterfactual scenarios however migration reduced poverty by 40 percent with different effects across regions for extreme poverty foreign transfers especially foreign pensions have a strong positive impact on very poor families in one region poor families in the other region suffer from a double loss their migrants do not provide local income and they do not send much money home

labour migration and social networks participation in southern mozambique this paper investigates how social networks in poor developing settings are affected by migration using a unique household survey from southern mozambique we test the role of labour mobility in shaping participation in groups and interhousehold cooperation by migrant sending households in village economies at origin we find that migration cum remittances boosts household engagement in community based social networks our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant sending communities

international migration the brain drain and poverty a cross country analysis the aim of the paper is threefold first it empirically investigates the effect of international migration on poverty in origin countries using data from a cross country analysis second it explores the specific part of the income distribution from which migrants are drawn by comparing the effect of international migration on different income quintiles of the population finally given that the selection of migrants depends not only on the income level of their households but also on the skill levels of movers the paper casts some light on the implications of the emigration of skilled workers on poverty this article shows that the stock of international migrants have a positive effect on the income of the poor while it does not have a significant impact on the income of the middle and top quintiles of the population in particular a 10 per cent increase in the per capita stock of migrants resident in oecd nations augments the income of the poor by 1 per cent on average and ceteris paribus finally the poverty reducing effect of migration holds even when the emigration process selects the best and the brightest

emigration and wages in source countries evidence from mexico abstract this paper examines empirically the effect of mexican emigration to the united states on wages in mexico using data from the mexican and us censuses from 1970 to 2000 the main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on mexican wages there is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in mexico due to emigration simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to mexico due to emigration is small however there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors

seasonal migration and agricultural production in vietnam abstract when markets are incomplete migration can have multiple effects on agricultural production i use instrumental variables techniques to explore the effects of seasonal migration on agricultural production in rural vietnam during the 1990s using network variables specific to vietnam as instruments i find that migrant households in north vietnam appear to move out of rice production and into the production of other crops inputs used by migrant households decrease relative to similar non migrant households the evidence is consistent with a shift from labor intensive into land intensive crops rather than productivity changes or the use of additional capital in production

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

poverty transition in rural vietnam the role of migration and remittances abstractthis study combines insights of the new economics of labour migration with the asset based approach to welfare dynamics using panel household data from vietnam this method allows us to determine whether poverty transitions induced by remittances are actually structural that is based on asset growth and therefore long term or stochastic that is based only on short term increases in income which implies a risk of falling back into poverty to control for endogeneity of remittances we use household fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation the paper shows that remittances have a positive impact on asset growth and that the impact differs with welfare status and ethnicity

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

remittances and inequality in this paper the authors propose a framework and develop techniques for analyzing the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size and subsequently its impact on rural welfare household data are used to assign numerical coefficients to the impact of net remittances from both internal and international migrants on income inequality in 2 mexican villages the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size depends critically on the degree to which migration opportunities become diffused through the village population on the returns to human capital embodied in remittances and on the distribution of potentially remittance enhancing skills and education across village households our empirical findings demonstrate that in a village where many households contain internal migrants but few have experience migrating to the u s remittances from mexico to us migrants have an unequalizing impact on village incomes while remittances from internal migrants have a favorable effect on the village income distribution by contrast in a village with a long historyh of sending migrants to the us and hence a more ready access to us labor markets us to mexico remittances have an equalizing impact on incomes remittances from internal migrants in this village however embody a large human capital component and are highly correlated with household income hence internal migrant remittances account for a comparatively large share of inequalities in the 2nd village the overall effect of remittances on income inequality is favorable in both villages migration type migration stage and interaction terms all appear to play a role in this context the effects of small changes in remittances upon income inequality and rural welfare in the 2 villages are explored and some implications for migration and rural development policy are considered authors modified

fair trade organic coffee cooperatives migration and secondary schooling in southern mexico abstract we explore three trends in rural southern mexico fair trade coffee migration and conditional cash transfers that could explain the rapid rise in education from 1995 2005 using survey data from 845 coffee farming households in oaxaca and chiapas mexico results from a household fixed effects model show that household participation in a fair trade organic cooperative contributed to about a 0 7 year increase in schooling for girls us migration opportunities appear to have even stronger positive impacts on schooling for females although participation in fair trade organic cooperatives appears also to have increased male schooling increased migration opportunities have had an indeterminate effect for males

devaluation and non traded goods in a labor migration model abstract in a three sector model with labor migration a devaluation which lowers non traded goods prices must raise labor s expected real wage as a group though in some sectors the real wage may fall ex post

does relative deprivation induce migration evidence from sub saharan africa this analysis revisits the decades old relative deprivation theory of migration in contrast to the traditional view that migration is driven by absolute income maximization we test whether relative deprivation induces migration in the context of sub saharan africa taking advantage of the internationally comparable longitudinal data from integrated household and agriculture surveys from tanzania ethiopia malawi nigeria and uganda we use panel fixed effects to estimate the effects of relative deprivation on migration decisions using per capita consumption expenditure and multidimensional wealth index as well being measures we find that a household s migration decision is based not only on its absolute well being level but also on the relative position of the household in the well being distribution of the community in which it resides we also discover that the effect of relative deprivation on migration is amplified in rural agricultural and male headed households results are robust to alternative specifications including the use of hausman taylor instrumental variable htiv estimator and pooled data across the five countries results confirm that the migration relative deprivation relationship also holds in the context of sub saharan africa we argue that policies designed to check rural urban migration through rural transformation and poverty reduction programs should use caution because such programs can increase economic inequality which further increases migration flow

source country earnings and emigration while higher wages at home reduce the incentive to emigrate by increasing the opportunity cost of working abroad they also facilitate emigration for liquidity constrained individuals our theoretical model examines the interaction between these two effects we show that i the relationship between the home country wage and emigration pressure is hump shaped ii the hump is more pronounced the lower the cost of migration and iii the ratio of high to low skilled emigrants is decreasing in the home country wage we test our model empirically for three different skill groups of emigrants and find strong evidence in support of the three hypotheses the peak emigration rate for the low skilled is estimated at 4000 at 2000 ppp adjusted prices a rise in the annual per capita income of the source country from 231 of the poorest economy in our sample to 4000 is associated with an increase in the emigration rate of its low skilled workers from about 2 7 to 5 0

migration remittances and inequality a sensitivity analysis using the extended gini index abstract this paper uses the extended gini inequality index to examine the sensitivity of measurements of impacts of migrant remittances on the distribution of household income by size to different value judgements when measuring inequality the results illustrate the robustness of earlier findings that the impacts of migration on village income distributions differ for different types of migration and for different periods in a village s migration history the magnitude of these impacts however appears to be quite sensitive to the weights attached to incomes at different points in the village income distribution for example in a village with considerable mexico to u s migration experience remittances from mexico to u s migrants have a favorable effect on the village income distribution however the extended gini analysis shows that this favorable impact decreases as more weight is attached to incomes in the poorest households this finding is consistent with the view that barriers to high paying mexico to u s migration work exist for households at the bottom of the village income distribution

asymmetric information about migrant earnings and remittance flows this paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of indian households with husbands working overseas in qatar on average wives underreport their husbands income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants the discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances an exchange model of remittances is developed with asymmetric information and costly state verification the optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet the model s predictions closely match our empirical findings

the effect of emigration from poland on polish wages in this paper we analyse the effect of emigration from poland on polish wages focusing on the 1998 2007 period for poland we use a unique dataset that contains information about household members who are currently living abroad which allows us to develop region specific emigration rates and to estimate the effect of emigration on wages using within region variation our findings show that emigration led to a slight increase in wages for high and medium skilled workers which are the two groups with the largest relative outmigration rates workers at the low end of the skill distribution might have experienced wage decreases

effects of enforcement on illegal markets evidence from migrant smuggling along the southwestern border abstract the paper analyzes the effects of tighter border control on the illegal crossing market between mexico and the united states combining panel data on illegal migrants with enforcement statistics the effects of enforcement are found to be moderate prices of border smugglers coyotes increased by only 17 while the demand for smugglers has remained unchanged enforcement has however shifted illegal migrants to remote crossing places border crossing is now more time intensive with higher prices for coyotes and risk of death this geographic substitution raised migration costs by 140 more than twice the effect of enforcement on smuggling prices

temporary migration and endogenous risk sharing in village india when people can self insure via migration they may have less need for informal risk sharing at the same time informal insurance may reduce the need to migrate to understand the joint determinat

informational barriers to credit for migrants evidence from guatemala abstractdoes being a migrant in a developing country cause an individual to receive less access to credit migrant status can be a useful signal for lenders in settings with weak contract enforcement and in the absence of well developed information markets i investigate this contract enforcement based explanation using data on households that have migrated within guatemala to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues i adopt an instrumental variables approach i identify individuals who are most sensitive to violence or crime and who were born in particularly dangerous locations the interaction of these factors causes these individuals to have a higher propensity to move although such migrants are not less likely to apply for loans from formal sources they are significantly less likely to receive them furthermore weak enforcement of contracts dominates alternative explanations of this result such as moral hazard and adverse selection

transforming rural economies migration income generation and inequality in rural mexico abstract we analyse how migration shapes the distribution and sources of rural income using nationally representative panel data from mexico income source gini decompositions provide some support for the migration diffusion hypothesis nevertheless migration s influence on other income sources and household re ranking substantially alter distributional impacts we find significant impacts of migration on non remittance income as well as changes in the effects of non migration activities on inequality over time we conclude that migration is transforming rural economies in ways that go beyond the scope of most past research on migration and inequality

life in a mexican village a sam perspective this article employs a social accounting matrix sam to analyse the economic structure of a migrant sending rural economy a village sam is constructed using 1982 household data from a major migrant sending village in central mexico the village matrix multiplier and its decompositions are derived from the sam and are utilised in policy experiments on the production value added income and investment flows of the village the results highlight the central role of both internal and international migration in the village economy as well as the importance of targeting directly anti poverty policies toward the landless

the shadow value of migrant remittances income and inequality in a household farm economy this article offers econometric evidence that income remittances sent home by family migrants stimulate household farm incomes indirectly by relieving credit and risk constraints on household farm production a high but unequally distributed shadow value of migrant remittances appears to reinforce an equalising direct effect of remittances on the income distribution across a sample of household farms in rural mexico

migration with endogenous moving costs we study a dynamic model of labor migration in which moving costs decrease with the number of migrants already settled in the destination this assumption is supported by sociological studies of migrant networks with endogenous moving costs migration occurs gradually over time once it starts it develops momentum and migratory flows may increase even as wage differentials narrow in addition migration tends to follow geographical channels and low moving cost individuals migrate first these patterns are consistent with historical evidence from the great black migration of 1915 1960 in the united states much of which cannot be reconciled with existing migration models excerpt

does migration raise agricultural investment an empirical analysis for rural mexico the effect of remittances on capital accumulation remains a contested topic this paper uses a panel data set from rural mexico to investigate the impact of remittances on agriculture and livestock investments after controlling for the endogeneity of migration through an instrumental variable estimation our empirical results show that international migration has a significantly positive effect on the accumulated agricultural assets but not on livestock capital this suggests that households use the capital obtained from international migration only to overcome liquidity constraints for subsistence production whereas migration itself seems to be the superior investment option compared to other productive activities such as livestock husbandry

an analysis of rural urban migration and protection in this paper a harris todaro migration model is developed with the urban manufacturing sector supplying a crucial input for the rural sector capital is region specific but flows freely between two urban sectors final goods are traded and have exogenously fixed prices if this economy imposes a tariff on the import competing manufacturing sector employment might go down even if the protected sector is labour intensive the paper describes how intersectoral linkages can play a significant role in determining the employment effects of a tariff summary in fre excerpt

illegal immigration border enforcement and relative wages evidence from apprehensions at the u s mexico border we examine illegal immigration in the united states from mexico over the period 1976 1995 one challenge is that we do not observe the number of individuals that attempt to enter the united states illegally we only observe the number of individuals apprehended attempting to cross the u s mexico border illegally based on a simple migration model we postulate the existence of an apprehensions function which expresses apprehensions at the border as a function of illegal attempts to cross the border and u s border enforcement effort we find that a 10 decrease in the mexican real wage leads to a 7 5 to 8 8 increase in apprehensions at the border excerpt

food insecurity gender and international migration in low and middle income countries abstract the determinants of migration have been widely studied but research has rarely addressed the roles of food insecurity and gender in the migration decision process to address these gaps we examine these relationships for 135 078 individuals across 94 low and middle income countries we use a series of binary choice models with sample selection and data from the 2014 2015 waves of the gallup world poll survey which includes the first global measure of individual level food insecurity results which are robust indicate that food insecurity is an important determinant of both migration intentions and preparations and the probability of migration intentions increase monotonically with the severity of food insecurity and the probability of migration preparations decrease these relationships also differ significantly by gender and level of gross national income evidence suggests a need for increased coordination between the international food security and migration policy agendas

fair trade organic coffee rural livelihoods and the agrarian question southern mexican coffee families in transition summary we use a random sample of coffee producing households in southern mexico to compare opportunities associated with government subsidies and migration to the role of fair trade organic coffee in household livelihoods although land and labor returns among fair trade organic coffee growers are higher than for conventional growers differences in yields are more important than price premiums moreover investment in education and labor opportunities outside coffee dominate those in fair trade organic coffee the results highlight the value of an integrated approach to the agrarian question that improves productivity and prices and supports other pathways for improving incomes

contractionary devaluation substitution in production and consumption and the role of the labor market using a demand determined model involving both consumption goods imports and home goods with imported inputs this paper shows that the condition under which devaluation reduces demand for home goods and thus aggregate output if real exports are fixed basically depends on the sign of one plus the weighted sum of the price elasticities of demand for imported consumer goods and of derived demand for imported inputs this model includes cooper s and krugman taylor s models as special cases and shows that substitution substantially lessens the possibility of contactionary devaluation however these results are dependent on the assumptions regarding the labor market and monetary policy if wages are indexed or are determined in a labor market with labor supply dependent on real wages then output and the balance of payments again become inversely related in these circumstances devaluation alone cannot cure a balance of payments deficit a contraction of aggregate demand is required relative to an unsustainable initial level devaluation should be judged in terms of its longer run impact rather than whether it is contractionary also increased borrowing to avoid a contractionary devaluation is neither relevant nor feasible in many cases

out migration wealth constraints and the quality of local amenities the relation between income and migration intentions can be monotonically decreasing increasing or inverse u shaped dependent on the level of migration cost relative to wealth and if individuals are credit constrained using unique individual level data covering countries in three geographic regions sub saharan africa asia and latin america we show that migration intentions respond to individual wealth and that the pattern differs across the country groups studied in a manner compatible with the predictions of our simple model we also show that contentment with various dimensions of local amenities such as public services and security are key determinants of migration intentions

the impact of migration on rural poverty and inequality a case study in china large numbers of agricultural labor moved from the countryside to cities after the economic reforms in china migration and remittances play an important role in transforming the structure of rural household income this article examines the impact of rural to urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in a mountainous area of hubei province using the data of a 2002 household survey since migration income is a potential substitute for farm income we present counterfactual scenarios of what rural income poverty and inequality would have been in the absence of migration our results show that by providing alternatives to households with lower marginal labor productivity in agriculture migration leads to an increase in rural income in contrast to many studies that suggest that the increasing share of nonfarm income in total income widens inequality this article offers support for the hypothesis that migration tends to have egalitarian effects on rural income for three reasons 1 migration is rational self selection farmers with higher expected return in agricultural activities and or in local nonfarm activities choose to remain in the countryside while those with higher expected return in urban nonfarm sectors migrate 2 households facing binding constraints of land supply are more likely to migrate 3 poorer households benefit disproportionately from migration

the human capital stock a generalized approach this paper presents a new framework for human capital measurement the generalized framework can i substantially amplify the role of human capital in accounting for cross country income dierences and ii reconcile the existing con ict between regression and accounting evidence in assessing the wealth and poverty of nations one natural interpretation emphasizes dierences across economies in the acquisition of advanced knowledge by skilled workers

network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality theory and evidence from mexico international migration is costly and initially only the middle class of the wealth distribution may have both the means and incentives to migrate which can increase inequality in the sending community however the migration networks formed lower the costs for future migrants which can in turn lower inequality this paper shows both theoretically and empirically that wealth has a nonlinear effect on migration and then examines the empirical evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between emigration and inequality in rural sending communities in mexico after instrumenting we find that the overall impact of migration is to reduce inequality across communities with relatively high levels of past migration we also find some suggestive evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship among communities with a wider range of migration experiences

migration networks and microenterprises in mexico are migration networks associated with lower capital costs or the alleviation of capital constraints we examine these questions with data measuring access to remittance flows among small scale entrepreneurs in mexico using a survey of more than 6000 self employed workers and small firm owners located in 44 urban areas of mexico we estimate the impact of attachment to migration networks on the level of capital investment the capital output ratio sales and profits of microenterprises the impact is identified from the geographic pattern of migration from mexico driven by the completion of rail lines in the early 1900s for the full sample of firms we find that migration is associated with higher investment levels and higher profits but not higher sales the strongest effects on investment are in the categories of automobiles tools and inventories when the sample is limited to firms in high capital sectors investment sales and profits all increase with attachment to the migration networks suggesting that attachment to the migration network alleviates capital constraints in those sectors

how borrowing constraints hinder migration theoretical insights from a random utility maximization model we provide a theoretical framework to analyze how financial constraints hinder migration introducing wealth heterogeneity and borrowing constraints into a random utility maximization model of migration we find evidence of multilateral resistance to migration stemming from borrowing constraints we calibrate the model on 22 european countries and we show that omitting the constraints biases upward the estimation of bilateral migration rates we then simulate an increase in the bilateral cost of migration to the united kingdom we find that omitting the constraints biases downward the change entailed by the cost increase in the bilateral rates of migration to all destinations

remittances and financial inclusion evidence from el salvador this paper investigates the impact of remittances on financial inclusion this is an important issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion can have significant beneficial effects on households using household level survey data for el salvador the authors examine the impact of remittances on households use of savings and credit instruments from formal financial institutions they find that although remittances have a positive impact on financial inclusion by promoting the use of deposit accounts they do not have a significant and robust effect on the demand for and use of credit from formal institutions if anything by relaxing credit constraints remittances might reduce the need for external financing from financial institutions while at the same time increasing the demand for savings instruments

accounting for selectivity and duration dependent heterogeneity when estimating the impact of emigration on incomes and poverty in sending areas the impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data but comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple selectivity problem first households self select into emigration second in some emigrant households everyone moves while others leave members behind and third some emigrants choose to return to the origin country allowing for duration dependent heterogeneity introduces a fourth form of selectivity one must now worry not just about whether households migrate but also when they do so this paper clearly sets out these selectivity issues and their implications for existing migration studies and then addresses them by using survey data designed specifically to take advantage of a randomized lottery that determines which applicants to the over subscribed samoan quota may immigrate to new zealand the analysis compares incomes and poverty rates among left behind members in households in samoa that sent samoan quota emigrants with those for members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the lottery policy rules control who can accompany the principal migrant providing an instrument to address the second selectivity problem while differences among migrants in which year their ballot was selected allow for estimation of duration effects the authors find that migration reduced poverty among former household members but they also find suggestive evidence that this effect may be short lived as both remittances and agricultural income are negatively related to the duration that the migrant has been abroad

brain drain in globalization a general equilibrium analysis from the sending countries perspective according to the economic literature high skilled emigration may either harm or bene t developing economies recent research highlighted several positive and negative channels through which the brain drain operates this paper aims at evaluating the relative magnitudes of various brain drain channels and quantifying their global impact on migrants sending countries for this purpose we develop a 10 region general equilibrium model of the world economy characterized by overlapping generations dynamics our ndings suggest that the short run impact of brain drain on resident human capital is extremely crucial as it affects not only the number of high skilled workers available to domestic production but also the sending economy s capacity to innovate adopt modern technologies this latter effect is particularly important in globalization where capital investments are made in places with high production ef ciencies hence despite positive feedback effects those countries facing prevalent high skilled emigration are the most candid victims to brain drain

the effects of international migration on migrant source households evidence from ethiopian diversity visa lottery migrants about a million people have migrated to the us via the diversity visa dv lottery the dv was instituted by an act of the united states congress to diversify the u s population through a lottery made available to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the country in any given year the probability of winning the lottery is less than 1 with millions of people from around the world competing for a maximum of 55 000 immigrant visas that can be obtained through this migration channel using ethiopian dv participants which have consistently made up between 6 and 8 of all dv immigrants i study the causal effects of emigration on the well being of the migrant sending families i infer that migration contributes positively to the welfare of the source families overall migration increases consumer expenditure but has no effect on savings and business ownership of the senders the positive treatment effects do not diminish with duration of emigration migrant men contribute more to the increase in their families standard of living than their female counterparts do while expenditure on food and energy are invariant to the migrants gender the gains in terms of durable ownership access to clean water and sanitation facilities occur almost entirely in families where the emigrants are men i find that dv participants are favorably selected relative to the overall population

temperature changes household consumption and internal migration evidence from tanzania large rural urban wage gaps observed in many developing countries are suggestive of barriers to migration that keep potential migrants in rural areas using long panel data spanning nearly two decades i study the extent to which migration rates are constrained by liquidity constraints in rural tanzania the analysis begins by quantifying the impact of weather variation on household welfare the results show how household consumption co moves with temperature rendering households vulnerable to local weather events these temperature induced income shocks are then found to inhibit long term migration among men thus preventing them from tapping into the opportunities brought about by geographical mobility

impacts of migration and remittances on ethnic income inequality in rural china summary migration is often viewed as the best option for poor rural households to exit out of poverty although the distributional effects of migrants remittances tend to be ambiguous in the literature given that increasing income inequality is a major concern and policy issue this paper examines the impacts of migration and migrants remittances on income inequality in china s rural minority areas using recent proprietary household data treating migrants remittances as a potential substitute for income the results reveal that migration significantly boosts income for all ethnic groups although the returns to ethnic minority households tend to be less than for han households decomposition analyses further reveal that migration increases inequality between ethnic groups despite reducing spatial inequality these countervailing effects imply that the continual transfer of rural urban migrants will likely lead to spatial convergence despite reinforcing ethnic inequalities in rural minority areas importantly the percentage contribution of ethnic inequality to total inequality is larger than that of spatial inequality across sampled rural locations thus highlighting the fact that the ethnic dimension is an important yet often overlooked component of inequality in china

human trafficking a shadow of migration evidence from germany this paper empirically analyzes the relationship between migration and human trafficking inflows into germany during the period between 2001 and 2010 my results suggest that migrant networks measured by migrant stocks from a specific source country have a causal linkage with the illicit exploitative form of migration human trafficking from that respective country however the network effect varies across different income levels of source countries the significant positive effect of migrant networks on human trafficking decreases as the income level increases and furthermore the effect is insignificant for high income countries

the great mexican emigration abstract in this paper we examine net emigration from mexico over the period 1960 to 2000 the data are consistent with labor supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to mexican emigration accounting for two fifths of mexican labor flows to the united states over the last two decades of the twentieth century net emigration rates by mexican state birth year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the mexican cohort relative to the corresponding u s cohort in states with long histories of emigration the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong consistent with the existence of preexisting networks

the effects of weather induced migration on sons of the soil riots in india migration is thought to cause sons of the soil conflict particularly if natives tend to be unemployed using data from india the authors investigate the causal effect of domestic migration on riots by instrumenting for migration using weather shocks in migrants places of origin they find a direct effect of migration on riots but do not find that this effect is larger in places with more native unemployment they argue and find evidence that migration is less likely to cause rioting where the host population is politically aligned with the central government politically privileged host populations can appease nativists and reduce migration through means that are less costly than rioting without these political resources hosts resort to violence beyond furthering the sons of the soil literature the authors detail a political mechanism linking natural disasters and possibly climate change and environmental degradation to riots and demonstrate a widely applicable strategy for recovering the causal effect of migration on violence

migrant remittances and information flows evidence from a field experiment do information flows matter for remittance behavior we design and implement a randomized control trial to quantitatively assess the role of communication between migrants and their international n

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

tariffs terms of trade unemployment and the real exchange rate the less developed countries ldcs have been subjected to major exogenous shocks and drastic domestic policy changes in recent years these shocks include changes in the terms of trade and or a policy shift away from the pervasive protectionism of the previous decades the implementation of trade liberalization programs is likely to follow in many more developing countries a large body of theoretical and empirical literature has developed which attempts to analyze the consequences of these changes utilizing models which explicitly incorporate the main structural and institutional characteristics of the ldc economies the behavior of the real exchange rate defined in various ways but most commonly as the relative price of tradeables to non tradeables has been identified as being of central analytical and policy importance while the literature on this subject recognizes the key link between the real exchange rate and domestic wages the analytical models used generally suffer from serious limitations in terms of their characterization of the labor markets the models used in the literature can be categorized into two groups a flex price models that give rise to full employment and b models that assume full or partial wage rigidity thereby generating some form of unemployment conventional wisdom suggests that a rise in import tariffs or an improvement in the terms of trade would always lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate however it is shown by clague 3 and edwards and van wijnbergen 11 that the above result does not necessarily hold in more general models however these analyses were restricted to models with flexible wages wage rigidity is often ascribed to the existence of some form of wage indexation or other forms of government inter

on migration and risk in ldcs the authors develop the hypothesis that aversion to risk rather than expectations of higher income is the primary motivation for rural urban migration in developing countries this hypothesis maintains that an optimizing risk averse small farmer family will try to place a family member in the urban sector in order to diversify its income portfolio an additional hypothesis related to risk is also considered at the individual rather than the family level annotation

remittances and financial development empirical evidence from heterogeneous panel of countries remittances are the second largest source of external finance after foreign direct investment in the developing economies in this study we analyse the role of incoming remittances on financial de

remittances and the use of formal and informal financial services summary while recent literature has pointed to a positive effect of migrants remittances on the financial development of receiving countries findings with respect to access to and the use of loans have been ambiguous this paper investigates the effect of remittances on the use of formal and informal financial services using mexican household data and finds positive and statistically significant effects of remittances on the ownership of savings accounts the existence of debts and on recent borrowing the fact that the effect of remittances on borrowing is driven by informal finance rather than by traditional bank loans points to deficiencies of the formal financial sector in addressing the financial needs of remittance receiving households we address methodological concerns of selection bias and reverse causality through household fixed effects and an instrumental strategy that exploits distance to train lines and labor market conditions in the us as exogenous determinants of remittances

worker remittances and inequality in rural egypt this study analyzes the impact of international migration and remittances on the rural socioeconomic order in egypt the empirical findings show that age marital status employment size of land farmed and number of household males over 13 years are all statistically related to the decision of an individual to go work abroad the variables age size of land farmed employment as a student and number of household males over 13 years of age are all negatively related to the decision to work abroad while the influence of all the other variables is positive the study shows that the remittance earnings of migrants abroad had a negative impact on rural income distribution in egypt the data indicate that remittances from abroad worsened rural household income distribution both in gross terms and in per capita terms because they were earned mainly by upper income villagers regardless of whether households are ranked in terms of gross income or per capita income households in the top income quintile benefited the most from remittances the findings thus tend to confirm those of gilani khan and iqbal and of lipton to the effect that international remittances have a deleterious effect on rural income distribution because they are earned mainly by upper income villagers however it should be noted that the negative impact of remittances on rural income distribution was neither automatic nor inevitable in the once abroad category of migrants the poorest households did send virtually the same number of workers abroad as households in the upper income groups had households sending migrants abroad been as evenly distributed in the past it may be logically inferred that the impact of remittances on rural income distribution would also have been more equitable

what s driving mexico u s migration a theoretical empirical and policy analysis using data gathered in 25 mexican communities the authors link individual acts of migration to 41 theoretically defined individual household community and macroeconomic level predictors the indicators vary through time to yield a discrete time event history analysis over the past 25 years probabilities of first repeat and return migration have been linked more to the forces identified by social capital theory and the new economics of migration than to the cost benefit calculations assumed by the neoclassical model the authors find that mexico u s migration stems from three mutually reinforcing processes social capital formation human capital formation and market consolidation

the effects of international remittances on poverty and inequality in ethiopia abstractthe article studies the effects of international remittances on poverty and inequality in ethiopia using an urban household survey from 2004 counterfactual consumption in the hypothetical case of no remittance is estimated in a selection corrected estimation framework inequality and poverty values in the hypothetical and actual cases are then compared there is a significant reduction in poverty while inequality does not change the head count the poverty gap and the squared poverty gap ratios decreased from 0 41 to 0 38 0 14 to 0 13 and 0 064 to 0 057 respectively

do immigrant outflows lead to native inflows an empirical analysis of the migratory responses to us state immigration legislation i estimate the impact on internal migration for 52 different demographic groups of the recent influx of state omnibus immigration laws targeting undocumented immigrants in the united states i find evidence that while the demographic groups pinpointed as having higher percentages of undocumented immigrants certainly experience population and employment outflows from states implementing these immigration laws there is a lack of associated inflows for those demographic groups identified by economic theory as being probable substitutes for undocumented immigrants several segments designated as probable substitutes actually experience an adverse effect on population and employment this finding provides rigorous empirical backing to existing anecdotal evidence of the same cross state migratory phenomenon resulting in clear policy implications in relation to the ongoing debate over immigration

credit availability and internal migration evidence from thailand this study investigates the relationship between borrowing and internal migration exploiting the micro finance scheme village fund in thailand it investigates the short and medium term effects o

remittances labour supply and activity of household members left behind abstractthis paper analyses the role of remittances on labour supply and activity of household members left behind by explicitly distinguishing between different types of self employment contrary to the existing evidence we find no dependency effect of remittances our results show that remittances received by households in tajikistan decrease the probability of wage employment and increase that of small scale self employment activities of men staying behind without affecting the number of job specific hours worked any positive effect on economic development would be however limited as self employment is in rather small scale activities that do not generate a regular income stream

international migration and nutritional outcomes in tajikistan abstract tajikistan is the country with the largest share of remittances to gdp in the world at the same time it suffers from stubbornly high levels of child malnutrition against which only very slow progress has been made this paper investigates the relationship between international migration and child malnutrition using data from a recent nationally representative household survey there are theoretical reasons to expect that migration may be exerting both positive and negative effects on nutrition and food security so that understanding what the net effect may be is essentially an empirical question our results indicate that migration appears to be playing a positive role in enhancing child growth patterns as measured by height for age z scores in the country we explore some of the possible channels through which this effect might be operating and find that one such channel is by increasing households kilocalorie consumption

endogeneity and sample selection in a model for remittances abstract we estimate a remittance model in which we address endogeneity and reverse causality relationships between immigrants remittances pre transfer income and consumption in order to take into account the fact that a large share of individuals do not remit instrumental variable variants of the double hurdle and heckit selection models are proposed and estimated by limited information ml semiparametric extensions are considered as robustness checks our results for a sample of recent immigrants to australia show that endogeneity is substantial and that estimates obtained by the methods previously employed in the literature may be misleading if given a behavioral interpretation

migration remittances and inequality estimating the net effects of migration on income distribution this paper examines the net effects of migration and remittances on income distribution potential home earnings of migrants are imputed as are the earnings of non migrants in migrant households in order to construct no migration counterfacmals to compare with the observed income distribution including remittances the earnings functions used to impute migrant home earnings are estimated from observations on non migrants in a selection corrected estimation framework which incorporates migration choice and labor force participation decisions for a sample of households in bluefields nicaragua migration and remittances increase income inequality when compared with the no migration counterfactual 1998 elsevier science b v

the formation of migrant networks in this paper we provide the first direct evidence on the internal structure of the migrant social network by using a purposely designed survey on sri lankan immigrants living in milan we show that the pattern of within group link formation is heterogeneous across immigrants and differentiated according to the network function i e accommodation credit job finding we find that migrants tend to interact with co nationals who come from nearby localities at origin while the time of arrival has a u shaped effect once the link is formed material support is provided mainly to relatives while early migrant fellows are helpful for job finding abstract from author

non farm activity household expenditure and poverty reduction in rural vietnam 2002 2008 summary diversifying into non farm activities has been suggested as an effective way out of poverty for rural households in developing countries using the vietnamese household living standards surveys of 2002 2004 2006 and 2008 we test this claim and investigate the effect of non farm sector involvement on poverty and expenditure growth our endogeneity corrected estimates show that an additional household member involved with non farm activity reduces the probability of poverty by 7 12 and increases the household expenditure by 14 over a two year period our findings also indicate that non farm involvement reduces the hours worked on farm but not the household agricultural income

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

revisiting the brain drain literature with insights from a dynamic general equilibrium world model the existing brain drain literature has found various mechanisms through which the high skilled south to north migration affects developing economies however some of the new found effects remain disputable due to limited evidence this study aimed to provide suggestive guidelines for future research by identifying the mechanisms that can generate larger economic impacts at the aggregate the analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium world model that is calibrated to published statistics and incorporates empirical estimates on the effects of brain drain it simulates short and long run impacts of increased brain drain on gdp per capita gni per capita and income inequality the results suggest that more studies should be conducted to further examine how the brain drain influences human capital formation and technology spillovers both have significant impacts on domestic production and national income a better understanding of different remitting patterns is also desirable to understand how to reduce inequality and promote recipients investment in productive assets

international migration self selection and the distribution of wages evidence from mexico and the united states we use the 1990 and 2000 mexican and u s population censuses to test borjas s negative selection hypothesis that the less skilled are those most likely to migrate from countries with high skill premia earnings inequality to countries with low skill premia earnings inequality we find that mexican immigrants in the united states are more educated than nonmigrants in mexico and were mexican immigrants to be paid according to current skill prices in mexico they would be concentrated in the middle of mexico s wage distribution these results are inconsistent with the negative selection hypothesis and instead suggest that there is intermediate selection of immigrants from mexico

remittances household expenditure and investment in guatemala the author uses a large household data set from guatemala to analyze how the receipt of internal remittances from guatemala and international remittances from the united states affects the marginal spending behavior of households on various consumption and investment goods contrary to other studies the author finds that households receiving remittances actually spend less at the margin on consumption food and consumer goods and durables than do households receiving no remittances instead of spending on consumption households receiving remittances tend to spend more on investment goods like education health and housing the analysis shows that a large amount of remittance money goes into education at the margin households receiving internal and international remittances spend 45 and 58 percent more respectively on education than do households with no remittances these increased expenditures on education represent investment in human capital like other studies the author finds that remittance receiving households spend more at the margin on housing these increased expenditures on housing represent a type of investment for the migrant as well as a means for boosting local economic development by creating new income and employment opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers

how do migration and remittances affect human capital investment the effects of relaxing information and liquidity constraints abstractthis article explores the heterogeneous effects of the migration remittance process on the educational attainment of nepalese children the results suggest that when controlling for remittances the children of more educated or informed parents suffer from parental absence while the children of less informed parents gain from migration implying that the migration experience helps less educated parents estimate the value of and returns to education more precisely the results also suggest that remittances help severely credit constrained households enrol their children in school and prevent dropouts these remittances help households that face less severe liquidity constraints increase their investment in quality education

research on rural to urban migration in ldcs the confusion frontier and why we should pause to rethink afresh abstract over 12 years of intensive research in the field of rural to urban migration have left the field beset with loss of direction and some serious doubts as to 1 whether research has really provided practitioners with more specific means of intervention 2 proper understanding of such intervention its justification and results 3 the areas in which the marginal benefit of extra research amounts to zero 4 those areas in which some consensus has emerged 5 which problem areas and specific issues merit intensive migration research in the coming years and 6 whether or not the academic profession has based its migration research effort in the past decade on an inappropriate set of presuppositions or even worse on invalid postulates a few examples of confusion and or fallacies that render this list more concrete are presented in this paper these are drawn from the areas of migration and fertility migration and education migration and the distribution of income by size migration and urban unemployment migration and the politics of economics migration and policy measures this paper then makes a plea for a major re evaluation which could and should provide a turning point in academic work and institutional thought the emphasis is on reformulation of the policy related presumptions on which research has been based for the past dozen years rather than trying to reach a better understanding of the decision making process generating rural to urban migration and its sectoral and overall social implications so as to devise more effective measures to contain reverse it the starting point should be an effort to effectively manipulate the phenomenon so as to turn it into a vehicle of national development and personal betterment