International labour migration and the many forms of poverty

Abstract

The discourse on migration and poverty has largely shown that international labour migration reduces monetary poverty for the migrant-sending households. With the international consensus that poverty is multidimensional and goes beyond income alone, many studies evaluate the nexus between migration and non-monetary aspects of life, such as education and health. These show mixed evidence. Far fewer studies assess whether suffering from simultaneous deprivations in multiple indicators of well-being is affected by migration—which would be a full multidimensional poverty analysis at the household level. To assess the value-added of the latter, we empirically compare three approaches to measure poverty and the effect of migration on the three. These are (1) a solely monetary approach, (2) a dashboard approach that considers several non-monetary well-being deprivations, and (3) a counting approach that evaluates whether the multiple deprivations manifest themselves jointly. Using household panel data for rural Bangladesh, we assess how the association between international labour migration and poverty among the stay-behind household members changes in light of the three approaches. The endogenous nature of migration in this connection is explicitly addressed by applying a Hausman–Taylor estimation procedure. We corroborate that poverty is related to a lower likelihood of being monetary poor, but we do not find that it is associated with an increased likelihood of exiting multidimensional poverty altogether. However, we do find that it is associated with a lower likelihood of facing simultaneous deprivations in terms of sanitation, electricity, and asset-ownership among those who live in multidimensional poverty.