Following in their footsteps: an analysis of the impact of successive migration on rural household welfare in Ghana

Eva-Maria Egger and Julie Litchfield

IZA Journal of Migration and Development, 2019, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Abstract We explore patterns of successive migration within rural households in Ghana and the impact that these successive migrants have on household welfare outcomes. Specifically, we use a household panel survey collected in 2013 and 2015. We exploit the panel nature of the data and a weighting method to overcome sources of bias. Welfare is measured with an index of housing quality. We find that successive migrants face lower migration costs, and few of them remit. We find no effect of sending a new migrant on the housing quality index. We conclude that the different nature of migration of successive migrants implies neither an economic gain for the household nor a loss. The reason is that the successive migration becomes less costly for migrants from households with prior migration experience, but at the same time, these migrants remit less or not at all compared to earlier waves of migrants.

Keywords: Migration; Ghana; Housing quality index; Multiple correspondence analysis; Entropy balancing weights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 D10 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40176-018-0136-4 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:izamig:v:9:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1186_s40176-018-0136-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40176

DOI: 10.1186/s40176-018-0136-4

Access Statistics for this article

IZA Journal of Migration and Development is currently edited by Amelie F. Constant, Denis Fougère and Tommaso Colussi

More articles in IZA Journal of Migration and Development from Springer, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().