Moving toward a Better Future? Migration and Children’s Health and Education

Lara Cockx

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2022, vol. 70, issue 3, 1229 - 1293

Abstract: Do the returns to migration extend beyond migrants themselves and accrue to the children of migrants? Drawing on data from a unique 19-year longitudinal survey from Tanzania, this paper empirically investigates this question by exploiting the variation in the outcomes of the children of migrants and the children of the migrants’ siblings who stayed behind, conditional on a range of individual characteristics of their parents. Parental migration has important implications for child development, and this relation depends on the destination and the timing of the move. More specifically, children whose parents migrated from rural areas to cities are heavier, taller, and more educated for their age. The effects on height and schooling are strongest for children who were exposed to the city environment during their early childhood. In contrast, children whose parents moved to a different rural village do not appear to experience any health advantage, and those moving alongside their parents even start schooling at a later age. In addition to conferring a broader view of the returns to physical mobility, this analysis contributes to the debate on the origin of spatial inequalities in developing countries.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/713931 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/713931 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/713931

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().