In June 2001, CBS conducted the tenth national population census, which counted individuals and absentee members in the entire country. I use the sample census micro-data, which covers 95 percent of the villages in the country. Within each village, one-eighth of the households are interviewed.

The census of 2001 was used to develop a sampling frame for the Nepal Labor Force Survey-II (NLFS-II) of 2008. This survey selected 800 primary sampling units (PSUs), or village wards, through a stratified random sampling method. In each of these PSUs, they randomly selected and interviewed 20 households.

For the Nepal Living Standards Survey-III (NLSS-III) of 2010, the list of PSUs selected for NLFS-II was used as the sampling frame. Of the 800 PSUs, 500 were selected, again by stratified random sampling to be part of NLSS-III PSUs. This was done to save time in the cartography and listing exercise by the CBS so that they could complete the survey before they began preparing the logistics for the census of 2011. In each of these PSUs, they randomly selected and interviewed 12 households each.

Though households cannot be tracked between these different surveys, 452 village wards are observed in all three datasets. Furthermore, these datasets also have information on the absentee members of the household: individuals that were considered member of the same household but had been absent at the time of enumeration. I use this information at the individual level to construct the migration rates at the village level. My measure of migration rate is the ratio of migrant to resident population in each village.

Additionally, I use district level migration rates from published census tables for years 1981 and 1991 to extend the panel back in time in some cases.

Figure 3 shows the spatial distribution of these PSUs all over the country. There is at least one panel village in 70 of the 75 districts. In all of the estimations, I use the NLSS-III sampling weights of these PSUs to make my estimates nationally representative. The weighted migration rates in the panel are: 9.57 for year 2010, 8.06 for 2008, and 3.47 for year 2001, very close to the rates reported in Table 1. A fuller set of descriptive statistics is presented in Table 3. Figure 4 shows the migration rates to India and non-India destinations for the 3 recent periods. As discussed above, migration to India tends to be more common from the mid and far-western regions of the country whereas migration elsewhere is increasing all over the country.

In the remainder of this section, I describe the context and relevance of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ shocks in this context along with the source of the data.

# **3.2 Rainfall and income**

Nepal is primarily an agricultural country with farm income heavily depending upon rainfall. During the 2001/2010 period, the share of agriculture in total GDP hovered between 35-38 percent (MoAD, 2013). In comparison, the total share of industry and manufacturing in GDP remained below 20 percent in the same period. In 2010, 80 percent of the households own agricultural land and the same proportion of the labor force is involved in agriculture<sup>13</sup> . Since the fraction of land that is irrigated remains low, agriculture depends heavily on rainfall. Rice and maize are the two major crops grown in the country, both of which are grown in the wet monsoon season. Rice is the key staple food and contributes to a fifth of the agricultural GDP (MoAC, 2008). In 2010, 74 percent of farming households grew rice and 61 percent of them grew maize<sup>14</sup> . Therefore, the amount of rainfall the country receives during the monsoon months is

> 13Author’s calculations from NLSS-III.

> 14Author’s calculations from NLSS-III.

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