Migration, remittances and educational outcomes: The case of Haiti
Introduction
Migration and remittances constitute a thematic constellation that has gained a lot of attention in recent years. This attention has resulted in a large strand of literature, covering especially the impacts of those phenomena on key development factors in poor countries.
Studies dealing with this issue heavily focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. This might be due to two facts: primarily, migration and remittances play an important role in that region. In 2005, the share of migrants in the entire population amounted to 5.1%, compared to 3% worldwide, and remittances sent to the region rose from 13 billion US$ in 1995 to 60 billion US$ in 2007, constituting up to 20% of the national GDP in some countries with Haiti being one of those (Ratha and Xu, 2008). Secondly, the most important migration corridors out of the region lead to the United States, a fact that implies a clear ‘south to north’ movement pattern (Ratha and Xu, 2008). Thus, Latin American and Caribbean countries provide the opportunity to investigate explicitly the impact of migration from developing to developed countries and of remittances flows in the opposite direction.
Given the increasing importance of migration and remittances, it seems natural to ask if both phenomena are advantageous or detrimental from the poor countries’ perspective. Literature in this context focuses on two main issues: the impact of migration and remittances on poverty and income equality (Acosta et al., 2006, Acosta et al., 2007, Acosta et al., 2008, Adams and Page, 2005, López-Córdova, 2005, Taylor, 1992, Taylor et al., 2005) as well as the impact of both phenomena on children's educational outcomes (Acosta, 2006, Acosta et al., 2007, Amuedo-Dorantes et al., 2008, Calero et al., 2009, Edwards and Ureta, 2003, Hanson and Woodruff, 2003, López-Córdova, 2005, McKenzie and Rapoport, 2006). This paper adds to the latter strand of literature as it investigates the impact of migration and remittances on educational outcomes in Haiti, which is one of the poorest countries in the world and the poorest country in the Latin American/Caribbean region, with half of the households living below the poverty line (Justesen and Verner, 2007). Especially, it is tried to disentangle the effects of both phenomena which have always been captured via a joint variable in previous literature.
Section snippets
Theoretical considerations
Theoretical considerations suggest that the effects of migration and remittances on educational outcomes go in opposite directions. The former can be supposed to affect the education process of children adversely while the latter is likely to lead to improved educational outcomes.
McKenzie and Rapoport (2006) propose several reasons why this is plausible. With regard to migration the authors argue that the absence of household members might cause an increase of children's duties in the household
Previous findings
The previous empirical findings concerning the impact of migration and remittances on educational outcomes in Latin American and Caribbean countries are ambiguous. Edwards and Ureta (2003) find positive effects of remittances on children's education in El Salvador whereas Acosta (2006) cannot find such an effect. For Mexico, Hanson and Woodruff (2003) obtain significantly positive estimates of a variable indicating whether the household has migrant members. However, this positive effect of
The Haitian educational system
The Haitian educational system is basically composed of three parts.1 The basic school education (enseignement fondamental) lasts nine years and is deemed to convey basic mental and technical skills to the students. Generally, children start school at the age of six, which implies an age of 15 at the end of the basic school education. The secondary school (enseignement
Data and empirical model
The data used for the empirical analysis is taken from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP) that is an extension of the Mexican Migration Project.2 The aim of the LAMP is to provide household survey data that can serve as a basis to investigate migrational processes from Latin American and Caribbean countries to the United States. Data has been collected in eight countries, Haiti being one of those. Amongst
Results
Table 5 displays the estimation results. The denoted hazard ratios indicate the proportional change of the hazard rate that occurs if the respective covariate increases by one unit (or switches from ‘no” to “yes” in the case of dichotomous covariates). It should be noted that a hazard ratio lower than unity is associated with a positive effect on educational outcomes, as it reduces the risk of a dropout.4
Conclusion
Using data from three Haitian communities the present paper investigates the effects of migration and remittances on educational outcomes. From a theoretical point of view, remittances can be supposed to have positive effects in poor households, as they alleviate budget constraints. Given the dominance of private facilities in the Haitian educational system and the high poverty rate prevailing in the country, budget constraints are likely to play an important role for educational outcomes.
Acknowledgements
The financial support of the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation for the project “Determinants of educational decisions in developing countries—Theory and empirical evidence from Haiti” is gratefully acknowledged. Furthermore I would like to thank Peter Winker, Iris Gönsch, Katharina Niehoff and Evans Jadotte for their helpful comments on the present paper.
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