Does Migration Reshape Expenditures in Rural Households? Evidence from Mexico

By J. Taylor, J. Mora. 2006

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Migration reshapes rural economies in ways that may go beyond the contribution of migrant remittances to household income. Consumption and investment expenditures by migrant-sending households may transmit some of the impacts of migration to others inside and outside the rural economy, and they also may shape the potential effects of migration within the source household. Numerous studies have attempted to quantify the impact of migrant remittances on expenditures in migrant-sending households following one of two approaches. The first asks how migrant remittances are spent. It has the advantage of being simple but the significant disadvantage of ignoring the fungibility of income from migrant and nonmigrant sources. Remittances almost certainly have indirect effects on expenditures by way of their contribution to households' total budgets. The second uses a regression approach that considers remittances as an explanatory variable, in addition to total income and other controls, in a household expenditure demand system. It has the advantage of enabling one to test whether remittances affect expenditures in ways that are independent of their contribution to total income. But it does not take into account other ways, besides remittances, in which migration may influence expenditure patterns in households with migrants. It also may suffer from econometric bias resulting from the endogeneity of migration and remittance receipts. The same variables may simultaneously affect both remittances and household expenditures, and unless one controls for this, biased estimates may result.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3688e902ac5320fef50405b0b72d6b4018bd58c

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Citations in the corpus

Migration, Remittances, Poverty, and Human Capital: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges (2007, background): “For instance, sound economic policies could simultaneously lead to a reduction in poverty and attract remittances intended for investment in the local economy, so that poverty and remittances would be negatively correlated without a causal relation (Taylor and Mora, 2006).”
Remittances and Household Expenditure Patterns in Tajikistan: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis (2011, methodology): “Empirical studies analysing the impact of remittances on expenditure patterns adopt an Engel curves framework (Taylor and Mora 2006, Tabuga 2007, Castaldo and Reilly 2007, Valero-Gil 2009).”
Work-Related Migration and Poverty Reduction in Nepal (2007, background): “…(2005) analyze the effects of migration on children’s health and schooling outcomes in Mexico; Du et al. (2005) study the relationship between migration and rural poverty in China; and Taylor and Mora (2006) investigate the effect of migration on expenditure patterns of rural households in Mexico.”
DO MIGRANT REMITTANCES AFFECT THE CONSUMPTION PATTERNS OF ALBANIAN HOUSEHOLDS (2007, methodology): “The estimation of the interaction model will also enable us, albeit to a limited extent, to compare our results to those found by other authors in this area of research (e.g., Adams, 2005, and Taylor and Mora, 2006).”
The Effects of Rural-Urban Migration on Rural Communities of Southeastern Nigeria (2013, background): “Some of these studies include those of Glytsos [30] in Eastern Europe, Sibanda [31] in South Africa, Azam and Gubert [32] in Mali, Lucas [33] in Albania and Morocco, Nwajiuba [34] in Nigeria, Adams [2] in Latin America, McKenzie [35], Taylor and Mora [36] in Mexico, Sorenson [11] in Somali, Pozo [37”