Migration's Income and Poverty Impact has been Underestimated
World Bank; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); University
of Chile IZA Discussion Paper No. 2088 This paper examines two
issues associated with the impact of migration on household
income and poverty. First, existing studies have typically
overlooked a feature of migration that should be taken into
account in estimating its impact, namely the fact that migration
changes the size of the household. The corrected impact that
does take the change in household size into account is presented
analytically and is estimated on the basis of data from Ghana's
GLSS household survey. The corrected impact is shown to be three
to five times larger for income and two to three times larger
for poverty than is obtained from standard analysis. Second,
existing studies examine migration's impact on the poverty of
the entire sample. However, some policy questions require
measures of the impact on the poverty of the migrant households
themselves. The latter is show