The Effect of Land Access on Youth Employment and Migration Decisions: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

By K. Kosec, Hosaena Ghebru, Brian Holtemeyer, Valerie Mueller, E. Schmidt. 2018

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

&NA; How does the amount of land that youth expect to inherit affect their migration and employment decisions? We explore this question in the context of rural Ethiopia using a 2014 cross‐sectional dataset indicating whether or not youth household members from a previous 2010 survey had migrated by 2014, and in which sector they worked in 2014. We estimate a household fixed effects model and exploit exogenous variation in the timing of land redistributions to overcome endogenous household decisions about how much land to bequeath to descendants. We find that larger expected land inheritances significantly lower the likelihood of long‐distance permanent migration and of permanent migration to urban areas. Inheriting more land also leads to a significantly higher likelihood of employment in agriculture and a lower likelihood of employment in the non‐agricultural sector. Conversely, the decision to attend school is unaffected. These results appear to be most heavily‐driven by males and by the older half of our youth sample. We also find suggestive evidence that several mediating factors matter. Land inheritance is a much stronger predictor of rural‐to‐urban permanent migration and non‐agricultural‐sector employment in areas with less vibrant land markets, in relatively remote areas (those far from major urban centers), and in areas with lower soil quality. Overall, these results affirm the importance of push factors in dictating occupation and migration decisions in Ethiopia.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b14859ef282e4de10963ec1592bf369601319ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. T. Jayne
3. H. Selod

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. T. Jayne
3. M. Muyanga
4. H. Selod

In Soil Science

1. M. Muyanga
2. T. Jayne
3. Forhad Shilpi
4. Hosaena Ghebru
5. W. Anseeuw
6. H. Selod
7. K. Deininger

Citations in the corpus

• Are medium‐scale farms driving agricultural transformation in sub‐Saharan Africa? (2019, background): “Lack of inheritance options is a major reason for youth outmigration (Holden & Bezu, 2014; Kocec et al., 2018; Muyanga et al., 2019).”
• Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature (2021, background): “Kosec et al. (2018) find that the existence of rural land markets can curb migration as they argue that migration happens due to household’s lack of access to land, which is relieved in the present of a land market.”