Migration, occupation and education: Evidence from Ghana

Clotilde Mahe and Wim Naudé

No 2016-018, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: We investigate whether the occupational productivity and employment status of individuals living in a household with migrants differ from those living in non-migrant households using the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS6) and the Africa Sector Database (ASD). We find that rural households and households with a head in more productive occupations are more likely to have migrant members, and that rural households and households with a head who are waged-employed are more likely to have a migrant than households with members who are self-employed. While these findings are not suprising, we find some more unexpected results. For instance, migrants do not always migrate to more productive occupations; migration can result in downward occupational mobility. Migrants in our sample do not send back much remittances. Migrant-sending households in Ghana are in fact more likely to send remittances to their relatives currently away, than to receive remittances. In an attempt to explain these somewhat puzzling findings, we argue that a motivation for rural households or households with a head in a more productive occupation to send out relatives is to support younger household members to pursue their education elsewhere. Migration is therefore a long(er)-run income-and-occupational diversification strategy of the more productively employed rural households in Ghana.

Keywords: migration; occupational choice; structural transformation; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O15 O18 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2016/wp2016-018.pdf (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:unm:unumer:2016018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).