This paper examines two issues associated with the impact of migration on household income and poverty. First, existing studies have typically overlooked a feature of migration that should be taken into account in estimating its impact, namely the fact that migration changes the size of the household. The ‘corrected’ impact that does take the change in household size into account is presented analytically and is estimated on the basis of data from Ghana’s GLSS household survey. The corrected impact is shown to be three to five times larger for income and two to three times larger for poverty than is obtained from standard analysis. Second, existing studies examine migration’s impact on the poverty of the entire sample. However, some policy questions require measures of the impact on the poverty of the migrant households themselves. The latter is shown to be twenty times larger for international migration and two to three times larger for internal migration, compared to the impact for the entire sample. It is further shown that these results hold whether the poverty measures are corrected for the change in household size.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
2088.
Find related papers by JEL classification: F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration O19 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - International Linkages to Development; Role of International Organizations R23 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: