Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union

Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Romuald Méango and Hillel Rapoport ()

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We investigate the impact of intra-regional migration on wage inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). We exploit unique data from a unified labour force household survey which covers natives and migrants in the seven economic capital cities of that region. We first estimate the counterfactual wage distributions of UEMOA migrants in absence of migration to evaluate the compositional effect of migration (i.e., when wages are treated as exogenous). We find that regional migration increases average wages by 1.8% and generates a decrease in inequality that ranges between −1.5% (for the Gini index) and −4.5% (for the interquartile ratio). This is essentially driven by a reduction in inequality between capital cities, while the effect of migration on within-capital cities inequality is heterogeneous across countries and remains small overall. Second, when accounting for possible general equilibrium effects of migration on stayers' wages (i.e., when wages are treated as endogenous), we find similar to stronger effects on inequality, albeit with a smaller increase in the average wage.

Keywords: Migration Interquartile ratio West Africa; Wage inequality; Gini index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Journal of Comparative Economics, 2020, 48 (2), pp.385-404. ⟨10.1016/j.jce.2019.10.002⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union (2020)
Working Paper: Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union (2020)
Working Paper: Regional Migration and Wage Inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (2019)
Working Paper: Regional Migration and Wage Inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (2019)
Working Paper: Regional Migration and Wage Inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (2018)
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:hal:journl:halshs-02491701

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2019.10.002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().