Correction to: Following in their footsteps: an analysis of the impact of successive migration on rural household welfare in Ghana

The original version of this article [1] has been published with an incorrect copyright holder and license text

Causes and consequences of internal migration: evidence from Brazil and Ghana

This thesis investigates socio-economic drivers and impacts of internal migration in two countries, Brazil and Ghana. The first empirical chapter analyses the choice of Brazilian workers to move out of metropolitan cities. This direction of movement is substantial in the Brazilian context and leading against standard models of rural-to-urban migration. I estimate the role of living costs and local amenities in the determination of the destination choice of metropolitan out-migrants. Furthermore, I quantify the returns to migrating out of a metropolis by computing counterfactual wages applying matching techniques. The metropolitan out-migrants prefer to move to smaller towns where their real wage gain is positive. They minimize the physical and social costs of migration by moving to closer towns within their state of birth. Living costs in big cities appear to be a main driver for workers to leave these, especially if they are low-skilled. In the second empirical chapter, I investigate the effect of internal migration on homicide rates in Brazil in the period from 2005 to 2010. I construct a retrospective panel of migration rates between municipalities and use local labour demand shocks in the manufacturing sector at the origins of migrants as instrument for immigration rates. An increase in immigration rates of 1% translates in an increase of 1.2% in crime rates at the local level. The effect is predominant in municipalities with historically higher homicide rates and there is no effect in locations with a large informal sector. While internal migration puts pressure on destination labour markets, these results suggest that it is the presence of a criminal or lack of a flexible sector that channel this pressure into negative outcomes. The third empirical chapter explores dynamic patterns of internal migration from rural areas in Ghana. With a new household panel survey collected in 2013 and again in 2015, I document that many households have multiple migrants moving at different points in time and for various reasons. Conditional on having had a migrant in the past, I estimate the effect of having a new migrant on the asset welfare of origin households. The findings suggest that due to prior migration experience and consequently lower migration costs for new migrants, there is no decline in welfare from having a new migrant

Correction to: Following in their footsteps: an analysis of the impact of successive migration on rural household welfare in Ghana

The original version of this article (Egger and Litchfield 2019) has been published with an incorrect copyright holder and license text. The original publication of this article has been updated to correct this

Migration and social networks: evidence from Bangladesh

Social networks play a key role in mitigating the risks of migration, with migrants typically making use of network and kinship capital in the decision of whether to migrate and to which destination. This paper adds to the empirical literature on the role of networks in migration decisions in Bangladesh using household survey data collected in Bangladesh in 2013. Our survey captures information on households and their migrant and resident members, migrant destinations and contacts at their destination. We distinguish between internal networks and international networks and analyse the importance of these in affecting the migration decision and destination choice. We also explore the gender dimensions of these decisions, finding that while male migration decisions are very sensitive to the existence and nature (internal or international), and even suggestive of a step-migration patterns of rural to urban to international destinations, women’s migration decisions are much more influenced by household characterises, such as household wealth

The Cost-Effectiveness of Complex Projects: A Systematic Review of Methodologies

Most development interventions are complex, comprising several interacting activities affecting multiple outcomes. Impact evaluations of such interventions are widespread, but the literature offers little guidance on how to assess the cost-effectiveness of such integrated projects. We review the literature that conducts cost-effectiveness analyses of multiple interventions alongside impact evaluations in low- and middle-income countries. Only seven studies are identified in areas as diverse as de-worming, school support, conditional cash transfers, early childhood development, and social funds. We find that none of the applied approaches can be effectively employed in all instances, though each of them can be applied in some special cases. Furthermore, none of the studies reviewed addresses output synergies. Given the rising numbers of impact assessments in development practice and their importance for policy, research needs to develop sound methods to assess the cost-effectiveness of integrated interventions.Department for International Development (DFID

Does the depth of informality influence welfare in urban Sub-Saharan Africa?

We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their influence on consumption, as a measure for welfare. Cross-sectional regressions for five urban Sub-Saharan Africa countries reveal a non-linear relationship between the depth of informality and household welfare. A mixed formality household portfolio has at least the same welfare as a fully formal one. Using panel data for Nigeria, we assess household switches in informality portfolios, accounting for selection on unobservables and find it explains most welfare differences. Switching informality portfolios does not change welfare trajectories, with the notable exception of welfare gains for fully informal households becoming fully formal. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that policies incentivizing the formalization of the marginal worker may not result in perceivable welfare effects.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin

Migrating Out Of Poverty in Zimbabwe

This paper present preliminary results from the MOOP household survey conducted in Zimbabwe in 2015. We provide a profile of migrants and of their households and also explore perceptions of the value of migration. Finally we provide an agenda for further research using our data. Two observations are worthy of further research. First is the finding that male migrants send more money home to their families than female migrants, which we suggest is due to differences in job opportunities available to migrant’s at their destination (skilled construction for men and domestic work for women). However this finding ignores the value of non-cash remittances, which we intend to explore in future work. We also find that households while generally positive about the value of migration to their living standards, are less positive in the context of international migration. We suggest this reflects recent events in South Africa, not least the devaluation of the Rand and an intensification of xenophobia.DFI