Migration, Remittances, Poverty, and Human Capital: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges

By David J. McKenzie, Marcin Sasin. 2007

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews common challenges faced by researchers interested in measuring the impact of migration and remittances on income poverty, inequality and human capital (or, in general, “welfare”) as well as difficulties confronting development practitioners in converting this research into policy advice. On the analytical side, the paper discusses the proper formulation of a research question, the choice of the analytical tools as well as the interpretation of the results, in the presence of pervasive endogeneity in all decisions surrounding migration. Particular attention is given to the use of instrumental variables in migration research. On the policy side, the paper argues that the private nature of migration and remittances implies a need to carefully spell out the rationale for interventions. It also notices the lack of good migration data and proper evaluations of migration-related government policies. The paper focuses mainly on microeconomic evidence about international migration, but much of the discussion extends to other settings as well.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f0df8704123926f5289e70bf5ad76ddd221530a

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In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Remittances and Household Expenditure Patterns in Tajikistan: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis (2011, background): “McKenzie and Sasin (2007) argue that researchers need to determine whether remittances are spent on consumption or investment and whether migrant families spend more on health and education.”
Remittances, schooling, and child labor in Mexico (2012, background): “if they are to migrate themselves in the future, or by the fact that migration may disrupt family life and, thus, have negative effects on school attendance (Kandel and Kao, 2001; McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010; McKenzie and Sasin, 2007).”
Migration and Economic Mobility in Tanzania: Evidence from a Tracking Survey (2011, background): “McKenzie and Sasin (2007) discuss at length the issue of endogeneity with respect to measuring the impact of migration on poverty, stating that work that does not identify causal relations provides ‘‘rather weak grounds for policy recommendations.’’”
International Remittances and Human Capital Formation (2014, background): “Based on the permanent income hypothesis, if remittances are considered as a temporary income they will be invested rather than spent (McKenzie & Sasin, 2007).”
The Genesis and Dynamics of Organizational Networks (2012, background): “A second manifestation of endogeneity is sample selection bias (McKenzie and Sasin, 2007).”
Evaluating the Economic Impact of International Remittances On Developing Countries Using Household Surveys: A Literature Review (2011, methodology): “For a list of the instrumental variables that have been used in the literature, see McKenzie and Sasin (2007).”