nach oben

Demography

Erschienen in:

01.11.2012

Repeat Migration and Remittances as Mechanisms for Wealth Inequality in 119 Communities From the Mexican Migration Project Data

verfasst von: Filiz Garip

Erschienen in: Demography | Ausgabe 4/2012

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

To evaluate the distributional impact of remittances in origin communities, prior research studied how migrants’ selectivity by wealth varies with migration prevalence in the community or prior migration experience of the individual. This study considers both patterns; it examines selectivity separately in low- and high-prevalence communities and for first-time and repeat migrants. Based on data from 18,042 household heads in 119 Mexican communities from the Mexican Migration Project, the analyses show that (1) first-time migrants in low-prevalence communities come from poor households, whereas repeat migrants in high-prevalence communities belong to wealthy households; and (2) higher amounts of remittances reach wealthy households. These results suggest that repeat migration and remittances may be mechanisms for wealth accumulation in the study communities. Descriptive analyses associate these mechanisms with increasing wealth disparities between households with and without migrants, especially in high-prevalence communities. The study, similar to prior findings, shows the importance of repeat migration trips, which, given sustained remittances, may amplify the wealth gap between migrants and nonmigrants in migrant-sending communities. The study also qualifies prior findings by differentiating between low- and high-prevalence communities and observing a growing wealth gap only in the latter.

Vorheriger Artikel Migration Systems in Europe: Evidence From Harmonized Flow Data

Nächster Artikel Diverging Destinies: Maternal Education and the Developmental Gradient in Time With Children

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich

Detailed information about the MMP is available online (http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu). The five communities surveyed as part of the pilot study in 1982 are excluded, as are the data collected nonrandomly from a small number of migrants in the United States.

Municipality or state average prices are used for communities with missing values.

The Ejido indicator is missing for five communities. We set the indicator to 0 in these communities to conserve sample size; however, the results remain identical if these communities are excluded from analysis.

We tested the robustness of our findings to two alternative measures of community distance to the United States: (1) distance to the closest international airport in Mexico, and (2) distance to the closest popular border crossing city, which includes Tijuana or El Paso, TX, prior to 1993; and Laredo, TX, El Centro, CA, and Nogales, AZ, thereafter, according to Orrenius (2006) and Singer and Massey (1998). The former measure takes into account the transportation networks in Mexico, and the latter considers the shifting enforcement zones in the United States. Both measures led to similar results in all models (available upon request).

Because wage in destination is a critical determinant of remittance behavior, migrants with missing wage information (about one-third of all migrants) are not used in the analysis. Alternative analysis with all the migrants, and without the wage variable, leads to similar wealth coefficient estimates (available upon request).

The results suggest the potential endogeneity of wealth indicators to migration or remittance outcomes, which may bias the empirical conclusions. To address this issue, we lag the household wealth indicators by one year. This approach does not solve the endogeneity problem if current migration decisions are correlated with past migration, which affects household wealth in the past, or if there are omitted variables related to both wealth and migration. We test for this possibility with a procedure suggested by Spencer and Berk (1981). We estimate two wealth equations (for land and property indicators, separately) with exogenous regressors (past rainfall and real interest rates, which are likely to affect wealth). We then add the residuals from these equations to the migration and remittance models as extra regressors. The coefficients for the regressors are jointly insignificant in both the migration (F statistic = 1.89, p = .39) and remittance (F statistic = 0.16, p = .85) models, and the null hypothesis that the wealth indicators are orthogonal to the errors cannot be rejected. These results suggest that the lagged wealth indicators can be treated as exogenous to current migration and remittance decisions. Crucially, this treatment does not preclude an association between wealth and past migration and remittances, but such an association does not seem to bias our estimates.

Communities were surveyed in different years by the MMP; therefore, our sample contains a different number of communities in each year. The number of communities is 119 in 1975, drops to 85 in 1995, and then drops further to 48 by 2000. Therefore, we restrict this analysis to the 1975–1995 period, during which the majority of the communities are observed consistently.

The estimates in Table 5 show that remittances decrease by 6 % per year that a migrant spends in destination. These estimates control for earnings differences among migrants, and therefore are not inconsistent with the raw comparisons presented here.

Because of the retrospective nature of the data, older—and consequently wealthier—individuals are observed in later years. To assure that the same age group is compared across time, we restrict the analysis to 25- to 45-year-olds in each year.

Acosta, P. (2008). What is the impact of international remittances on poverty and inequality in Latin America? World Development, 36(1), 89–144.CrossRef

Acosta, P., Calderon, C., Fajnzylber, P., & Lopez, H. (2006). Remittances and development in Latin America. World Development, 29, 957–987.

Adams, R. (1989). Worker remittances and inequality in rural Egypt. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 38(1), 45–71.CrossRef

Adams, R. (1992). The effects of migration and remittances on inequality in rural Pakistan. Pakistan Development Review, 31, 189–203.

Adams, R. H., Jr. (1998). Remittances, investment, and rural asset accumulation in Pakistan. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 47(1), 155–173.CrossRef

Arroyo, J. A., & Berumen, S. S. (2000). Efectos sub-regionales de las remesas de emigrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos. Comercio Exterior, 50, 340–349.

Assies, W. (2008). Land tenure and tenure regimes in Mexico: An overview. Journal of Agrarian Change, 8(1), 33–63.CrossRef

Barham, B., & Boucher, S. (1998). Migration, remittances, and inequality: Estimating the net effects of migration on income distribution. Journal of Development Economics, 55, 307–331.CrossRef

Berk, R. A. (1983). An introduction to sample selection bias in sociological data. American Sociological Review, 48, 386–398.CrossRef

Canales, A. I., & Montiel, I. A. (2004). Remesas e inversión productiva en comunidades de alta migración a Estados Unidos. El caso de Teocaltiche, Jalisco. Migraciones Internacionales, 2(3), 142–172.

Castro, J., & Tuirán, R. (2000). Las remesas de los trabajadores emigrantes a Estados Unidos. Comercio Exterior, 50, 318–333.

Cohen, J. (1999). Cooperation and community economy and society in Oaxaca. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cohen, J. (2001). Transnational migration in rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, development, and the household. American Anthropologist, 103, 954–967.CrossRef

Cohen, J. H. (2002). Social responses to migration among Mexican ethnic minorities: Outcomes in sending and receiving communities (Working paper series 3). Aalborg, Denmark: The Academy for Migration Studies.

Cohen, J., & Rodriguez, L. (2005). Remittance outcomes in rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Challenges, options and opportunities for migrant households. Population, Space and Place, 11, 49–63.CrossRef

Conway, D., & Cohen, J. (1998). Consequences of migration and remittances for Mexican transnational communities. Economic Geography, 74(1), 26–44.CrossRef

DeWalt, B. R., & Rees, M. W. (1994). The end of agrarian reform in Mexico: Past lessons, future prospects. In Transformation of rural Mexico. Center for U.S-Mexican Studies, University of California–San Diego.

Dinerman, I. (1978). Patterns of adaptation among households of US-bound migrants from Michoacán, Mexico. International Migration Review, 12, 485–501.CrossRef

Durand, J. (1994). Más allá de la línea. Mexico: Fondo para la Cultura y las Artes.

Durand, J., Kandel, W., Parrado, E. A., & Massey, D. S. (1996a). International migration and development in Mexican communities. Demography, 33, 249–264.CrossRef

Durand, J., & Massey, D. S. (1992). Mexican migration to the United States: A critical review. Latin American Research Review, 27(2), 3–42.

Durand, J., Massey, D. S., & Zenteno, R. M. (2001). Mexican immigration to the United States: Continuities and changes. Latin American Research Review, 36, 107–127.

Durand, J., Parrado, E. A., & Massey, D. S. (1996b). Migradollars and development: A reconsideration of the Mexican case. International Migration Review, 30, 423–444.CrossRef

Firebaugh, G. (1999). Empirics of world income inequality. The American Journal of Sociology, 104, 1597–1630.CrossRef

Firebaugh, G. (2000). The trend in between-nation income inequality. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 323–339.CrossRef

Goldring, L. (1996). The changing configuration of property rights under Ejido reform. In L. Randall (Ed.), The reform of Mexican agrarian reform (pp. 271–287). New York: M.E. Sharp.

Gonzalez, C. P. (1970). Democracy in Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hamilton, S. (2002). Neoliberalism, gender, and property rights in rural Mexico. Latin American Research Review, 37(1), 119–143.

Heckman, J. J. (1979). Sample selection bias as a specification error. Econometrica, 47, 153–162.CrossRef

Hoddinott, J. (1994). A model of migration and remittances applied to Western Kenya. Oxford Economic Papers, 46, 459–476.

Hoffman, K., & Centeno, M. A. (2003). The lopsided continent: Inequality in Latin America. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 363–390.CrossRef

Huber, E., Nielsen, F., Pribble, J., & Stephens, J. D. (2006). Politics and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. American Sociological Review, 71, 943–963.CrossRef

Jones, R. C. (1995). Ambivalent journey: US migration and economic mobility in North-Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Jones, R. C. (1998). Remittances and inequality: A question of migration stage and geographic scale. Economic Geography, 74(1), 8–25.CrossRef

Koechlin, V., & Leon, G. (2007). International remittances and income inequality: An empirical investigation. Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 8, 205–226.

Kuznets, S. (1955). Economic growth and income inequality. American Economic Review, 45, 1–28.

Lowell, B. L., & de la Garza, R. O. (2002). The development role of remittances in U.S. Latino communities and Latin America. In R. de la Garza & B. L. Lowell (Eds.), Sending money home: Hispanic remittances and community development (pp. 3–27). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Lozano, F. A. (2003). Discurso oficial, remesas y desarrollo en México. Migración y Desarrollo, 1(1), 23–31.

Lozano, F. A. (2007). Migración y desarrollo: Remesas y su impacto en la economía Mexicana. In M. I. Mateos (Ed.), Migración: Reconfiguración transnacional y flujos de población (pp. 135–144). Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla.

Massey, D. S., & Espinosa, K. E. (1997). What's driving Mexico-U.S. migration? A theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis. The American Journal of Sociology, 102, 939–999.CrossRef

Massey, D. S., Goldring, L., & Durand, J. (1994). Continuities in transnational migration: An analysis of nineteen Mexican communities. The American Journal of Sociology, 99, 1492–1533.CrossRef

Massey, D. S., & Parrado, E. A. (1998). International migration and business formation in Mexico. Social Science Quarterly, 79, 1–20.

Massey, D. S., & Zenteno, R. M. (1999). The dynamics of mass migration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 96, 5328–5335.CrossRef

McKenzie, D., & Rapoport, H. (2007). Network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality: Theory and evidence from Mexico. Journal of Development Economics, 84(1), 1–24.CrossRef

Mines, R. (1981). Developing a community tradition of migration to the United States: A field study in rural Zacatecas, Mexico, and California Settlement Areas. In Monographs in US–Mexican studies no. 3: Program in United States–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego.

Mines, R., & de Janvry, A. (1982). Migration to the United States and Mexican rural development: A case study. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 64, 444–454.CrossRef

Mines, R., & Massey, D. S. (1985). Patterns of migration to the United States from two Mexican communities. Latin American Research Review, 20(2), 104–123.

Mora, J. (2005). The impact of migration and remittances on distribution and dources of income (United Nations population division working paper). New York: United Nations.

Morley, S. (2001). The income distribution problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago, Chile: United Nations Press.

Munshi, K. (2003). Networks in the modern economy: Mexican migrants in the U.S. labor market. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 549–599.CrossRef

Orrenius, P. (2006). The effect of U.S. border enforcement on the crossing behavior of Mexican migrants. In J. Durand & D. S. Massey (Eds.), Crossing the border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project (pp. 281–298). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Paige, J. M. (1997). Coffee and power: Revolution and the rise of democracy in Central America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rapoport, H., & Docquier, F. (2006). The economics of migrants’ remittances. In S.-C. Kolm & J. M. Ythier (Eds.), Handbook of economics of reciprocity, giving and altruism (pp. 1135–1198). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland.

Ratha, D., & Xu, Z. (2008). Migration and remittances factbook 2008. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications.CrossRef

Reichert, J. (1981). The migrant syndrome: Seasonal US wage labor and rural development in central Mexico. Human Organization, 40(1), 56–66.

Reichert, J. (1982). A town divided: Economic stratification and social relations in a Mexican migrant community. Social Problems, 29, 411–423.CrossRef

Rempel, H., & Lobdell, R. A. (1978). The role of urban-to-rural remittances in rural development. Journal of Development Studies, 14, 324–341.CrossRef

Singer, A., & Massey, D. S. (1998). The social process of undocumented border crossing among Mexican migrants. International Migration Review, 32, 561–592.CrossRef

Smith, R. C. (1998). Transnational localities: Community, technology and the politics of membership within the context of Mexico and U.S. migration. In M. P. Smith & L. E. Guarnizo (Eds.), Comparative urban community research (pp. 196–238). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Spencer, D. F., & Berk, K. T. (1981). A limited information specification test. Econometrica, 49, 1079–1085.CrossRef

Staiger, D., & Stock, J. H. (1997). Instrumental variables regression with weak instruments. Econometrica, 65, 557–586.CrossRef

Stark, O., & Levhari, D. (1982). On migration and risk in LDCs. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 31, 91–196.CrossRef

Stark, O., & Taylor, J. E. (1991). Migration incentives, migration types: The role of relative deprivation. The Economic Journal, 101, 1163–1178.CrossRef

Stark, O., Taylor, J. E., & Yitzhaki, S. (1986). Remittances and inequality. The Economic Journal, 96, 722–740.CrossRef

Taylor, J. E. (1992). Remittances and inequality reconsidered: Direct, indirect, and intertemporal effects. Journal of Policy Modeling, 14, 187–208.CrossRef

Taylor, J. E. (1999). The new economics of labour migration and the role of remittances in the migration process. International Migration, 37(1), 63–88.CrossRef

Taylor, J. E., Adams, R. H., Jr., & Mora, J. (2009). Remittances, inequality and poverty: Evidence from rural Mexico. In J. Dewind & J. Holdaway (Eds.), Migration and development within and across borders: Research and policy perspectives on internal and international migration. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Migration and The Social Science Research Council.

Taylor, J. E., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Massey, D. S., & Pellegrino, A. (1996). International migration and community development. Population Index, 62, 397–418.CrossRef

Taylor, J. E., Rozelle, S., & de Brauw, A. (2003). Migration and incomes in source communities: A new economics of migration perspective from China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52(1), 75–101.CrossRef

Tuirán, R. G., & Santibáñez, J. R. (2006). El monto de las remesas familiares en México: ¿mito o realidad? Papeles de Población, 50, 147–169.

Wiest, R. E. (1973). Wage-labor migration and the household in a Mexican town. Journal of Anthropological Research, 29, 180–209.

Woodruff, C., & Zenteno, R. (2007). Migration networks and microenterprises in Mexico. Journal of Development Economics, 82, 509–528.CrossRef

World Bank. (2008). World Bank development report 2008: Agriculture for development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Zenteno, R. M., & Massey, D. S. (1998). Especifidad versus representatividad: Enfoques metodologicos para el estudio de la migracion internacional. Estudios Demogroficos y Urbanos, 40, 75–116.

Titel: Repeat Migration and Remittances as Mechanisms for Wealth Inequality in 119 Communities From the Mexican Migration Project Data
verfasst von: Filiz Garip
Publikationsdatum: 01.11.2012
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Demography / Ausgabe 4/2012
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Elektronische ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0128-6

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 4/2012

Maternal Age and Offspring Adult Health: Evidence From the Health and Retirement Study

Volume 49 Index

Scarring and Mortality Selection Among Civil War POWs: A Long-Term Mortality, Morbidity, and Socioeconomic Follow-Up

Migration Systems in Europe: Evidence From Harmonized Flow Data

Measuring Cohabitation and Family Structure in the United States: Assessing the Impact of New Data From the Current Population Survey

Fertility Transitions and Schooling: From Micro- to Macro-Level Associations