Working Paper

Does Migration Improve Living Standards of Migrant-Sending Households? Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

author(s) Adelmoneim, Yousra. - Litchfield, Julie.
from UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
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themes
regions
  • Northern Europe
  • Europe
  • World
  • Eastern Africa
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Africa
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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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)

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