Migration, Youth, and Agricultural Productivity in Ethiopia

This paper explores the relationship between migration and agricultural productivity in Ethiopia. Given that there are fairly significant returns to either rural-urban or international migration for labor in Ethiopia, it could be that credit constraints hindering migration start-up are an unexplored constraint against migration. The paper primarily uses the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey panel and a migrant listing exercise completed after the 2009 survey round to explore whether past agricultural productivity (e.g. in 2004) explains later migration. Using standard regression techniques, it finds that among young migrants, there appears to be a positive, significant relationship between productivity and households sending out a migrant. This relationship holds even when proxies for credit are included in the model; the effect appears to, in fact, be stronger among households who are less endowed with land. However, the magnitude of this effect is small. The paper also considers feedback effects from migration to later agricultural productivity; this correlation is weaker suggesting that migration does not have negative productivity impacts. * Alan de Brauw is a Senior Research Fellow, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division, International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 USA, phone: + 1 202 862 5698, email:[email protected]. I thank Jill Bernstein for excellent research assistance without which this paper would not be possible, as well as Yisehac Yohannes for providing some help with the data. Ruth Vargas Hill, Daniel Ali, and Forhad Shilpi all provided comments that improved the paper. I thank the World Bank for funding the writing of the paper; all errors are my own. The data used in the paper have been made available by the Economics Department, Addis Ababa University, the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford and the International Food Policy Research Institute. Funding for data collection was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); the preparation of the public release version of these data was supported, in part, by the World Bank. AAU, CSAE, IFPRI, ESRC, SIDA, USAID and the World Bank are not responsible for any errors in these data or for their use or interpretation. 1 Migration, Youth, and Agricultural Productivity in Ethiopia