Migration, the financial crisis, and child growth in rural Guatemala

Migration has been demonstrated by various studies to be closely linked to improvements in individualand household-level outcomes. It is difficult to identify with confidence the causal effects of migration, however, and likely that some of the observed differences are related to selection. In this paper, rather than examining the “positive” effects of migration, we put the spotlight on how the global financial crisis emanating from the U.S. negatively affected migrant households in rural Guatemala. Treating the financial crisis as a natural experiment affecting migrant and non-migrant households differently, we examine the effect on child anthropometry. Panel data on children, and multiple children in households allow a triple difference estimation in which we control not only for additive selection effects related to migration, but also differences in household-level trends over time. Migrant households fared much worse, in relative terms, than non-migrant households over the period. In particular, our assessment demonstrates that substantial advantages in child anthropometric status for the youngest children in migrant households in 2008, just prior to the crisis, were in large part lost only four years later. This finding emphasizes the potentially tenuous nature of the benefits of migration.