Does Migration Improve Living Standards of Migrant-Sending Households? Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
This paper aims to evaluate the impact of migration on household welfare, especially consumption expenditure
Abstract
This paper aims to evaluate the impact of migration on household welfare, in particular the consumption expenditure in Ethiopia, using cross-sectional data collected from 1,200 rural households from 4 different regions in 2014. The authors estimate a counterfactual distribution of household consumption per capita, using a Heckman selection model to control and test for selection bias, to analyse to what extent households have gained from having a migrant. Their results suggest that on average, migration has a positive impact on the rural living standards but that gains are not distributed evenly across the consumption distribution. They find that poorer households in fact experience a decline in living standards by having a migrant.
This paper is published under the Migrating out of Poverty programme, which is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).
Citation
Yousra Abdelmoneim and Julie Litchfield. Does Migration Improve Living Standards of Migrant-Sending Households? Evidence from Rural Ethiopia. Migrating out of Poverty RPC Working Paper No. 41 Migrating out of Poverty Consortium, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (2016) 54 pp.
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