positively correlated with the likelihood to migrate. In contrast to the needs of young children, the needs of the elderly are more likely to be financial and thus encourage migration. In addition, the “availability” of grandparents to help raise the children may enable the parents to become migrants.

Community-level variables have been added to the selection model to estimate the importance of push factors in motivating migration in Ghana. Because community-level variables are common to migrants and non-migrants alike, their impact on the migration outcome can be interpreted as a “push” factor of migration. Another way to see these variables as push factors is to note that they, unlike individual characteristics such as age, education, and experience, are unlikely to influence migrant earnings in the destination region and therefore cannot provide the “pull” of an expectation of higher wages. The community-level variables in Table 2 have been constructed using the literacy ( _lit_clusH_ ), health insurance coverage ( _pay_clusH_ ), and access to water ( _wtr_clusH_ ) and sanitation ( _sni_clusH_ ) outcome indicators from the full GLSS5 sample.<sup>11</sup> All of them have been calculated as excluded means, i.e. the community average excluding the household for which the mean is calculated, to remove the influence of the household on the average. Furthermore, although the indicators measure outcomes rather than access to services, a link between these outcomes and community service provision has been established using the rural community survey module of GLSS5. In particular, the presence of a literacy program has been confirmed as an important determinant of community literacy rates, and the primary source of water in the community is a statistically significant determinant of the average level of access to an improved water source.

Communities with higher levels of literacy, higher rates of subsidized medical care, and better access to water and sanitation are less likely to produce migrants. In all specifications, the literacy and health variables are significant and correctly signed, indicating that lack of access to these services increases the likelihood of migration. The average level of education in a community is also a potentially important determinant of migration, but community education and literacy are highly collinear in the GLSS data and only one variable is a significant determinant of migration when both are present. Access to improved drinking water sources and improved sanitation facilities in the origin communities is correctly signed but insignificant, but only because availability of these services is highly correlated with community literacy and health outturns. If the latter variables are removed from the regression (column 3 of Table 2), both the water and sanitation variables become significant. Interestingly, once these community-level characteristics are controlled for, the rural dummy is no longer significant in explaining the likelihood of migration. Another potentially important community variable for determining migration—distance to nearest market—was not significant in any of the specifications, but this could be because this variable was only available for rural communities.

> 11 Literacy is defined as one’s ability to read a sentence in either English or at least one of the Ghanaian languages. Health insurance coverage is defined as 1 if an employer, the government, or a health insurer pays the greatest portion of a patient’s medical expenses, and 0 otherwise. Access to improved water is defined as having access to pipe-borne water. Access to improved sanitation is defined as access to a flush toilet or KVIP (Ghana Water Directorate 2008).

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