The Effects of International Remittances on Poverty and Inequality in Ethiopia

Abstract

The article studies the effects of international remittances on poverty and inequality in Ethiopia using an urban household survey from 2004. Counterfactual consumption in the hypothetical case of no remittance is estimated in a selection-corrected estimation framework. Inequality and poverty values in the hypothetical and actual cases are then compared. There is a significant reduction in poverty, while inequality does not change. The head count, the poverty gap and the squared poverty gap ratios decreased from 0.41 to 0.38, 0.14 to 0.13, and 0.064 to 0.057 respectively.     

How do Migration and Remittances Affect Human Capital Investment? The Effects of Relaxing Information and Liquidity Constraints

Abstract

This article explores the heterogeneous effects of the migration–remittance process on the educational attainment of Nepalese children. The results suggest that when controlling for remittances, the children of more educated or informed parents suffer from parental absence, while the children of less informed parents gain from migration, implying that the migration experience helps less educated parents estimate the value of and returns to education more precisely. The results also suggest that remittances help severely credit-constrained households enrol their children in school and prevent dropouts. These remittances help households that face less severe liquidity constraints increase their investment in quality education.     

Remittances and Chain Migration: Longitudinal Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Most of the literature on remittances focuses on their implications for the welfare of family members in the country of origin and disregards their role as facilitator of chain migration. We address this issue with the use of longitudinal data from Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the primary exporters of migrants and recipients of remittances in the world. We find that remittances have a significant positive impact on the migration prospects of their recipients. Better-endowed people are most likely to migrate, which highlights a potential negative implication of migration and remittances.     

Remittances,Poverty, Inequality and Welfare: Evidence from the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso

This paper applies Gini and concentration coefficient decomposition as well as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty index and the Stark-Yitzhaki welfare index to new data from four villages in Burkina Faso, to compare the marginal effects of remittances from intercontinental and intra-African migration on inequality, poverty and social welfare. Evidence is found that intra-African remittances reduce inequality while intercontinental remittances have the opposite effect. Also, it is found that although remittances from intercontinental migration are associated with much lower incidence, depth and severity of poverty, the marginal impact of remittances from this form of migration on social welfare is limited because recipients do not include the rural poor.     

For Health,Strength, and Daily Food: The Dual Impact of Remittances and Public Health Expenditure on Household Health Spending and Child Health Outcomes

Abstract

Child and infant mortality in developing countries decreased 33.5 per cent and 30.9 per cent, respectively, during 1995–2009, while remittances and public health spending more than doubled. I examine how remittances and government health spending improve these child health outcomes. Neither government health spending nor remittances causally affect household health spending. Public health spending has an insignificant negative impact on mortality. The increase in remittances causally accounts for 32 per cent and 37 per cent of the decline in child and infant mortality, respectively. Remittances reduce mortality through improved living standards from the relaxation of households’ budget constraints.     

Poverty and Disasters: Do Remittances Reproduce Vulnerability?

Abstract

In many low-income countries, remittances are important in sustaining people’s livelihood and become even more significant during disasters. Meanwhile, the literature suggests that remittances are mainly accessible to middle and upper-income households, rather than to the poorest, thus implying differential capacities amongst households to overcome crises. The present study uses cyclone Evan that hit Samoa in December 2012 as a case study to test this hypothesis. It focuses on the village of Tafitoala and draws on interviews and participatory activities undertaken with the poorest households of the community. It indicates that the poor receive little to no remittances and that they struggled more than the rest of the community to cope with and recover from the cyclone. Their lack of access to remittances had negative consequences on the security and sustainability of their livelihoods. We conclude that remittances reproduce or even increase both inequalities and vulnerabilities existing within the community of origin.     

Ethiopian female domestic labour migration to the Middle East: patterns,trends, and drivers

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the trends, patterns, and determinants of Ethiopian domestic labour migration to Arab countries. The primary motive behind migration is to move out of poverty and to improve family living standards through remittances. Migration to Arab countries has intensified due to social networks, expansion of illegal agencies, and the relative fall of migration costs. This movement is also the result of a shift in demand away from Asian domestic workers who tend to seek higher wages, to cheap labour source countries such as Ethiopia. This underlines not only the complexity of human mobility across national borders but also indicates the importance of conceptualising this movement in a broader global perspective, going beyond the traditional push-pull factors embedded in origin and destination countries. Female domestic migrants have received marginal attention from policy-makers and their vulnerability to various forms of abuse and exploitation has continued over the years.     

Poverty Transition in Rural Vietnam: The Role of Migration and Remittances

This study combines insights of the New Economics of Labour Migration with the asset-based approach to welfare dynamics using panel household data from Vietnam. This method allows us to determine whether poverty transitions induced by remittances are actually structural, that is, based on asset growth and therefore long term, or stochastic, that is, based only on short-term increases in income, which implies a risk of falling back into poverty. To control for endogeneity of remittances, we use household fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation. The paper shows that remittances have a positive impact on asset growth and that the impact differs with welfare status and ethnicity.     

Sharing Norm Pressures and Community Remittances: Evidence from a Natural Disaster in the Pacific Islands

Abstract

Migrants are often subject to social pressures to remit beyond their own households, to share the benefits of migration with the wider community in their home country; these are ‘community remittances’. We hypothesise that community sharing norm pressures are stronger in locations with more extensive home community networks. We also postulate that the responsiveness of remittances to sharing pressures is subject to diminishing returns, attributable to a donor fatigue effect. Using customised survey data from three Polynesian migrant groups in metropolitan and regional Australia, we estimate double-hurdle regression models of community remittances. To identify the effects of sharing norm pressures we exploit an exogenous (cyclone) shock to home country incomes affecting one sub-group. We find strong evidence in support of the postulated responsiveness of community remittances to location-related differences in sharing norm pressures, and the presence of a donor fatigue effect. The policy implications are discussed.     

I am becoming my mother: (post)diaspora,local entanglements and entangled locals

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the sensory, self-shifting approach of Lorna Goodison’s 1986 poem ‘I am becoming my mother’, and on quantum theory for brief insights into entanglement, this article gazes into the still visualities of family photographs of my own Birmingham childhood (my mother died that same year) to push towards a more entangled conception of (post)diaspora. I use this highly personal entanglement to take issue with three troublingly disentangled ways in which postdiaspora has been imagined in recent academic literature: as the culmination of a teleological movement from migrant to diaspora to post-diaspora; as the slowly weakening pull of diasporic responsibilities and remittances; and as a means to archaise and de-link from ties to a forgetful and irresponsible diaspora. Ultimately, the article pushes towards a more deeply materially and personally entangled version of (post)diaspora.     

The Income Lever and the Allocation of Aid

Abstract

The article develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the allocation of aid. The authors call this concept the income lever. Making use of tax and distributive theory, the article shows how different redistributive criteria correspond to the different normative criteria of the income lever. It then constructs various income lever indexes based on these criteria and uses such indexes to rank countries according to their own capacity to reduce poverty.     

Currie's ‘leading sector’ strategy of growth: an appraisal

Abstract

Development policies in the pastoral areas of Africa assume that pastoralists are poor. Using the Afar pastoralists of Ethiopia as the focus of research this article challenges this depiction of pastoralism by exploring pastoral livelihood goals and traditional strategies for managing risk. Investment in social institutions to minimise the risk of outright destitution, sometimes at the cost of increased poverty, and significant manipulation of local markets enable the Afar to exploit a highly uncertain and marginal environment. Improved development assistance and enhanced targeting of the truly vulnerable within pastoral societies demands an acceptance that pastoral poverty is neither uniform nor universal.     

Quantifying the Qualitative: Eliciting Expert Input to Develop the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool

Abstract

This article discusses the participatory creation of the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT), a survey-based thematic indicator developed in China and India. The core of the article focuses on the use of expert elicitation to inform the construction of MPAT’s household and village surveys, the cardinalisation of survey responses, and the weighting scheme design. This is followed by a discussion of the potential pitfalls of expertise in development, the decision not to aggregate MPAT into an index, creating locally relevant poverty lines, and ideas for future research. The article closes with a summary of lessons learned.     

Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality

Abstract

Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topics – the rule of law, the functioning of judicial systems, property rights, labour politics, and business and governance, among others. Research on legal empowerment has been largely applied, with clearest grounding in the fields of law and economics. This special issue speaks to this gap with contributions on six core areas of legal empowerment. This article frames the collection. It provides a brief introduction to legal empowerment and advances two broad arguments. First, an ethnic group-focused approach is a useful starting point in considering the impact of legal empowerment and other development interventions. Second, the state via the law contributes to ethnic inequalities in four broad ways – via its written laws, their implementation and actual practice, historical legacies of law and practice, and ethnic hegemony embedded in the system. Thinking about legal empowerment initiatives within this framework provides understanding both of their potential and their limitations.     

French Caribbean organizations and the ‘Black question’ in France

Abstract

Collective remittances are a particular kind of flow, which is gaining more and more attention. It puts into light the role of diaspora associations in promoting the development of the origin countries. The aim of the article is to analyze how diaspora associations cope with development issues and the impacts of these activities in terms of migrants' new forms of citizenship. It draws attention on the relationship between diaspora and transnationalism stressing that, nowadays, the immaterial dimension of ethnic belonging encompasses also a material dimension made of cross-border connections; thus, allowing migrants to participate on the both shores of migration. Using the concept of the Political Opportunity Structure, the article shows the role played by the host country on the way migrants organize themselves and on how they act as citizens at home by engaging in development actions. The comparative approach puts into evidence that the different characteristics of Ghanaian migrants in Italy and in the UK shape transnational development actions but in a different way than one would expect: the relative lack of integration seems to stimulate migrants to better development actions at home since, in so doing, they can be recognized as actors also in the place where they live.     

The Impact of Microcredit on Child Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Rural China

Abstract

This article assesses causal effects of formal microcredit on children’s educational outcomes by using household panel data (2000 and 2004) in north-west rural China. The unobservables between borrowers and non-borrowers are controlled in static and dynamic regression-discontinuity designs. The static analysis reveals significant positive impact of microcredit on schooling years in 2000 only, and no influence on academic performance for either wave. The dynamic analysis shows progressive treatment effects on both longer schooling years and higher average scores. Formal microcredit improves education in the longer term compared to the short term, and hence may help relaxing the grip of educational poverty traps.     

Being poor,feeling poorer: Combining objective and subjective measures of welfare in Albania

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how combining objective and subjective measures of welfare can enrich traditional poverty profiles by exploring the relationship between these welfare measures, and examining what explains the differences between the two. One important finding of our analysis (using data for Albania) is that reconciling subjective and objective poverty profiles suggests the presence of sizable economies of scale. This result calls for increased attention to the proper estimation of a scale parameter for poverty analysis, as changes in assumptions on economies of size and adult equivalence scales are likely to produce significant changes in the analysis of poverty and its distribution across households and individuals.     

The Determinants of Collective Coproduction: The Case of Secondary Schools in Russia

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on parents’ participation in their children’s education via self-organizing through non-profit organizations (NPOs). The aim of this article is to uncover the factors which have an impact on Russian parenting organizations participating in collective coproduction in schooling. Quantitative analysis revealed three groups of explanatory variables: a) the “economic” variables, namely GRP per capita and poverty rate; b) a “high status” of a school; and c) variables capturing the “federal district effect” on the probability of collective coproduction. Results of the quantitative analysis highlight the significant discrepancies in regional conditions for emerging NPOs in coproduction in schooling.     

From ‘remittance’ to ‘tax’: the shifting meanings and strategies of capture of the Eritrean transnational party-state

Abstract

For decades, mass out migration has remained a defining characteristic of Eritrea. The country's first major refugee crisis occurred in the early 1980s, in the midst of its liberation movement. Upon gaining resettlement in the industrialized world, Eritreans overwhelming continued their support of the liberation war, both financially and politically. Since independence, the ruling government adopted strong measures to ensure the diaspora's continued political and economic engagement. We examine the Eritrean party-state's changing relationship with members of its dispersed population focusing on the evolution of an expatriate tax (2 percent Income Tax on Eritreans Working Abroad) levied on all emigrant Eritreans. Building on work that argues for recognizing the social and political dimensions of money sent ‘home’, this paper makes two contributions. First, we use an historical perspective to show how contextual changes can significantly shift the meanings of remittances, in this case from a voluntary patriotic remittance sent to the liberating government, to a coerced tax. Second, we bring the remittance-tax into the literature on remittances and development, expanding the types of income transfers under consideration. Attention is drawn to the party-state's articulation of the 2 percent Tax policy as a national development imperative and the various transnational governance mechanisms employed to coerce compliance. Citizenship serves as a lens for examining the state's instrumentalization and politicization of the diaspora's engagement with the Eritrean nation.     

Can Producer Associations Improve Rural Livelihoods? Evidence from Farmer Centres in India

Abstract

Rural producer associations are considered a potential community-driven solution to the problems of smallholder agriculture. This article evaluates the impact of organising female farmers into producer associations in Gujarat, India. The initiative provided training, information, access to inputs, risk mitigation, and market linkages. Over 18 months, the programme weakly increased members’ non-farm income and access to output markets. It had stronger impacts on members’ awareness and utilisation of financial services. Impacts were heterogeneous, varying by pre-existing socioeconomic conditions. These findings suggest that producer associations can lower transaction costs for smallholders, but that poverty alleviation may be a longer-term prospect.