What are Migrants Willing to Pay for Better Home Country Institutions?: The Case of Viet Nam

Ngoc Tran, Michael Cameron and Jacques Poot

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: We conduct the first contingent valuation investigation of the preference of international migrants for better home country institutional quality. Our study uses contingent valuation questions in a survey of Vietnamese migrants living in New Zealand (NZ) in 2016 to establish the compensating differentials that make those migrants indifferent between residing in New Zealand and returning to Viet Nam (VN) in hypothetical scenarios. We find that the estimated willingness to pay for an incremental unit improvement in institutional quality in Viet Nam is, on average, NZD 79.80 per week (approximately 33 percent of the average weekly wage in Viet Nam for the same period), and positively associated with the respondents’ age and the perceived importance of institutional quality in Viet Nam to their repatriation intentions. This study underscores the importance of institutional quality to migration decisions by showing that migrants are willing to trade-off part of their regular income for better home country institutional quality.

Keywords: return migration; institutional quality; contingent valuation method; willingness to pay; Viet Nam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 H40 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2018-08-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mig, nep-sea and nep-tra
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wai:econwp:18/10

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