that there should be a rigorous evaluation of the development impacts of the program. We decided on Tonga and Vanuatu as the focus of our evaluation, since it was expected that they would be the countries that participated most, and they offer an interesting contrast in previous migration history with New Zealand.<sup>7</sup> Tonga (population 100,000) has traditionally had high emigration rates to New Zealand, Australia and the United States, with most recent migration through family-sponsored categories and a special annual permanent migration quota to New Zealand called the Pacific Access Category. The 2006 New Zealand Census enumerated 20,520 Tongan-born in New Zealand.<sup>8</sup> In contrast to Tonga, Vanuatu (population 215,000) has had relatively little international emigration, with only 1.5 percent of its population abroad prior to the RSE (World Bank, 2008), and fewer than 1,000 Vanuatu-born in the 2006 New Zealand Census.

Given that recruiting of workers occurred at the employer level, the interests of employers in screening workers themselves, and the large number of employers involved, it was never going to be feasible to attempt to get employers to randomly select workers. Therefore we decided the most credible impact evaluation strategy would be a matched difference-in-differences approach. This would entail conducting a baseline survey of households which would participate in the RSE before the workers left, along with surveys of non-participating households, and then following these households over time. Non-participating households would be separated into whether or not they had a member of the work-ready pool who had applied for the program, but not been selected.

The RSE contains no country-specific quotas, so ex ante it was not known how many individuals from each country would participate in the scheme. However, the numbers likely to be involved were certainly too small for a simple random sample of households to pick up enough RSE households in a cost-effective way – at most 5% of households would be likely to participate in the program. This meant we needed to know RSE status before surveying. Survey design was then complicated by the fact that approvals to recruit workers and recruitment took place on a rolling basis. For example, the first employer to recruit workers under the RSE initially contracted 20 Tongans workers in July 2007, the next employer in Tonga contracted 6 workers in August, and the next 35 in September. In Vanuatu, a grower co-operative (Seasonal Solutions) contracted 232 workers in one go, with smaller employers also recruiting at staggered intervals. Once workers were selected for recruitment, there was often only two or three weeks before they left for New Zealand, which left a very short window of time to interview them and their household for baseline, or to at least interview their household within a week or two of their

> 7 Tuvalu and Kiribati both had fewer than 100 workers per season participate in the RSE, offering insufficient sample size for rigorous impact assessment. Samoa was the other main kick-start country. A one-off ex-post survey of households was conducted there.

> 8 <u>http://www.stats.govt.nz/Census/2006CensusHomePage/QuickStats/quickstats-about-a-subject/culture-andidentity.aspx</u> (accessed August 13, 2010).

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