Does Migration Make Rural Households More Productive? Evidence from Mexico

J. Edward Taylor and Alejandro Lopez-Feldman

No 07-10, Working Papers from Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO - ESA)

Abstract: The migration of labor out of rural areas and the flow of remittances from migrants to rural households is an increasingly important feature of less developed countries. This paper explores ways in which migration influences incomes and productivity of land and human capital in rural households over time, using new household survey data from Mexico. Our findings suggest that a massive increase in migration to the United States increased per-capita incomes via remittances and also by raising land productivity in migrant-sending households. They do not support the pessimistic view that migration discourages production in migrant-sending economies, nor the view implicit in separable agricultural household models that migration and remittances influence household incomes but not production.

Keywords: Migration; income; agricultural production; Mexico. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-eff and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/ah852e/ah852e.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.fao.org: No such host is known.

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Migration Make Rural Households More Productive? Evidence from Mexico (2010)
Working Paper: Does migration make rural households more productive? Evidence from Mexico (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fao:wpaper:0710

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO - ESA) Agricultural Sector in Economic Development Service FAO Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 00153 Rome Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gustavo Anríquez ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).