 Self-employment and migrationSamuele Giambra and David McKenzie World Development, 2021, vol. 141, issue C Abstract: There is a widespread policy view that a lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for migration, accompanied by suggestions of the need to spend more on creating these opportunities so as to reduce migration. Self-employment is widespread in poor countries, and faced with a lack of existing jobs, providing more opportunities for people to start businesses is a key policy option. But empirical evidence to support this idea is slight, and economic theory offers several reasons why the self-employed may in fact be more likely to migrate. We put together panel surveys from eight countries to descriptively examine the relationship between migration and self-employment, finding that the self-employed are indeed less likely to migrate than either wage workers or the unemployed. We then analyze seven randomized experiments that increased self-employment. The causal impacts of these programs on migration are often small in magnitude, and a negative relationship is only found when looking over time horizons of at least two years post-treatment. Keywords: Internal migration; International migration; Self-employment; Migrant selection; Randomized experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:141:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x20304903 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105362 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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