Temporary Migration, Labour Supply and Welfare

This essay addresses the incidence of temporary migration in poor rural economies. The methodological view taken here is that temporary or seasonal migration is a strategy of self-insurance, used largely by peasant households in order to cope with the risk of unemployment and income loss during agricultural slack seasons. Households typically implement the insurance strategy by sending away some of its working members to seek urban jobs during slack seasons while the remaining members pursue rural employment. This allows for diversification of household slack season income risks to the extent that the incomes from rural and urban sources are not fully correlated. The analytical focus of this paper is on exploring how household behaviour, especially with respect to labour supply, is affected by participation in seasonal migration. The market and income distributional outcomes of seasonal migration are also analysed in relation to the corresponding outcomes in the counterfactual state of no migration. The following results are obtained. In the event that the participation in slack season migration is utility/welfare improving, the participating households are likely to supply more labour during the post-migration peak season, compared to the counterfactual state. The intuition is simple. In an intertemporal (i.e., a two season) setting, participation in welfare improving migration in the slack season will allow households to allocate more resources for consumption in the peak season. Higher consumption leads to higher effort supply via the consumption-effort relationship. In terms of the aggregate/market outcomes of migration, the land-owning (employer) households and the peasant households with migrants will experience welfare gains while non-participating peasant households will suffer a welfare loss relative to the counterfactual state.Development; poverty; seasonal rural-to-urban migration; rural labour markets; risk coping strategies

Google Apps for Education: Valparaiso University\u27s Migration Experience

Many campuses are investigating cloud-based or hosted email solutions. This paper will cover Valparaiso University’s decision to move to the Google Apps for Education platform and our campus migration strategy. Google Apps offers significant savings in both cost of service and cost of support / maintenance while simultaneously offering functionality improvements to the campus experience over our previous system. Valparaiso University was using the GroupWise email and calendaring system and began the process of migrating all of campus to the Google Apps for Education platform in early 2011. Our process began with a student led evaluation team to select the new platform and started rolling out to new students beginning summer of 2011 with migration of existing students conducted from July 2011 through October 2011. Faculty / Staff migration began in December 2011 and were rolled out on a department by department basis throughout the spring 2012 Semester. Heavy promotion and utilization of multiple “Meet Google Apps” presentations greatly enhanced communication about the process and reduced migration anxiety. Apps were limited during migration process to those that reproduced existing system functionality to avoid over-taxing IT support resources. Valparaiso University’s migration process has been refined several times and overall feedback from students, faculty, and staff has been very positive throughout the process

Migration and capital accumulation: Evidence from rural Mexico

This paper studies the link between migration, remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in Mexico over the period 1997- 2006. In a context of financial markets imperfections, migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision (through remittances from migrants) and, thus, exert a positive effect on investment. However, it may well be the case that remittances are channelled towards increasing consumption and leisure goods. Exploiting within family variation and an instrumental variable strategy, we show that migration indeed accelerates productive assets accumulation. Moreover, when we look at the effect of migration on consumption of non-productive assets (durable goods), we find instead a negative effect. Our results then suggest that poor rural families resort to migration as a way to mitigate constraints that prevent them from investing in productive assets.migration ; remittances ; capital accumulation ; rural poverty

Competition for Migrants in a Federation: Tax or Transfer Competition?

The paper provides an equilibrium analysis of how countries compete for migrants. The type of competition (tax or transfer competition) depends on whether the competing countries have similar policy preferences. With symmetric preferences, countries compete in taxes for migrants. With asymmetric preferences, migration competition takes place in income support levels. The results are robust to the degree of mobility and to whether high-income or low-income households are mobile. The results are relevant, e.g., for federal policies that tackle inefficient migration competition and for evaluating whether a country may wish to adopt unilateral ‘migration-purchase’ policies.migration, redistribution, income taxation, government strategy, endogenous type of competition

Migration, Poverty Reduction Strategies and Human Development

This paper focuses on the specific question of how Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) address migration and its potential to enhance human development at the national level. Based on a review of PRSPs completed since 1999, it argues that migration often remains poorly recognised or analysed in poorer countries in terms of its impacts on poverty reduction, whilst attitudes towards migration in these countries are often highly negative and/or based on limited evidence, especially in relation to internal migration. Analysis of how both internal and international migration are treated in PRSPs is also placed in the context of a broader understanding of the purpose of, and constraints faced by the PRS process. The paper goes on to highlight the extent to which in Sub-Saharan African countries, successive drafts of PRSPs have shown increasing attention to migration. It also considers how analysis of the problems and opportunities associated with different types of migration are converted into policy initiatives, highlighting the lack of good practice in terms of the incorporation of migration into human development policy.Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), internal migration, international migration, sub-Saharan Africa, analysis of migration

Seeking Opportunities: Migration as an Income Diversification Strategy of Households in Kakamega District in Kenya

Migration and remittances are widely seen as major components of diversification strategies aimed at coping with risky environments in developing countries. The debate in the literature mainly concentrates on effects of and access to the strategy of migration. Against this background, the paper investigates patterns, determinants and the impact of internal migration on households based on data from a densely populated rural area in Western Kenya. The motivation behind migration is largely economic in kind. Accordingly, remittances account for a substantial share of household incomes. Results derived from a probit model estimation indicate that the likelihood of migration is independent from the wealth position of households. Instead, demographic household factors, education-related variables and migrant networks are of central importance. Migration and remittances are obviously more easily accessible than other opportunities of income diversification beyond farming for households across all levels of wealth, including the poorest households.Migration, remittances, income diversification, coping strategies, sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya.

The Economic Drivers of Human Trafficking: Micro-Evidence from Five Eastern European Countries..

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal migration patterns and incomplete information are the key determinants of human trafficking. To test our argument, we use a unique new dataset of 5513 households from Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine. The main result is in line with our expectations: Migrant families in high-migration areas and with larger migrant networks are much more likely to have a trafficked victim among their members. Our results also indicate that illegal migration increases trafficking risks and that awareness campaigns and a reduction of information asymmetries might be an effective strategy to reduce the crime.Human Trafficking; Migrant Exploitation; Illegal Migration; Migration Networks; Eastern Europe;

Migration and Technological Change in Rural Households: Complements or Substitutes?

In this paper we study the interrelationship between determinants of migration, conceived as a family strategy, and the potential impact of having a migrant household member on people left behind. Labour migration is often related to poverty but given its lumpy-investment nature, poverty may constitute a motivation to migrate as well as a constraint to do it. We use cross-sectional household data from two rural regions of Bangladesh to test whether migration is a form of income diversification strategy that significantly influences the risk-taking behaviour of source farm households in agricultural activities. We account for heterogeneity of migration constraints differentiating between domestic (temporary and permanent) and international moving destinations. We find that richer and large-holder households are more likely to participate in costly high-return migration (i.e. international migration) and employ modern technologies, thereby achieving higher productivity. Poorer households, on the other hand, are not able to overcome entry costs of moving abroad and fall back on migration with low entry costs, and low returns (i.e. domestic migration), which does not help them to achieve production enhancements and may lock them into persistent poverty. We interpret our results as evidence that if migration is a profitable household activity, entry constraints may hinder the access to it and its effectiveness as income diversification strategy.