Youth Self-Employment in Households Receiving Remittances in Macedonia

Marjan Petreski (), Nikica Mojsoska-Blazevski (), Maja Ristovska () and Edi Smokvarski

Working Papers PMMA from PEP-PMMA

Abstract: The objective of this study is to investigate whether youth in households receiving remittances in Macedonia have a higher probability of establishing their own business. In addition, we investigated whether the effect of remittances on youth labour supply is homogenous across the genders and across ethnic and rural/urban divides. We used the DotM 2008 Remittance Survey and the instrumental variables approach to address the potential endogeneity of remittances with respect to the self-employment status. Two instrumental variables were used which affect remittances, but not the decision to be self-employed, except through remittances: a non-economic motive to migrate, and the existence of migrants’ network. Moreover, we overcome some of the deficiencies of the IV estimation by applying the Roodman’s conditional mixed-process (CMP) estimator. Results robustly suggest that youth in households which receive remittances have considerably larger probability of establishing their own business, ranging between 28% and 33%, compared to their non-youth non-receiving counterparts. The main policy recommendation is that the Macedonian government should start devising a strategy for channelling remitted money into more productive use, especially converting those funds into jobs for youth.

Keywords: remittances; migration; self-employment; Macedonia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F24 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://portal.pep-net.org/documents/download/id/23828 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lvl:pmmacr:2014-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers PMMA from PEP-PMMA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().