No abstract

The impact of international migration on the labor supply of workers' nonmigrant relatives has not been well documented in the literature. Using household survey data representing mostly overseas contract workers, i.e., temporary migrants, this paper shows that labor supplies of migrants and their nonmigrant relatives are inseparable. Migrants reduce the labor supply of nonmigrant relatives, which translates into lower earnings from local labor markets. Households substitute income for more leisurea significant and previously little recognized benefit of emigration for Philippine households. This benefit varies by gender of nonmigrants and is generally higher for men.

This paper uses new cross-country data to assess the relationship between public spending on health care and the health status of the poor. Data are drawn from two sources: (i) existing data on health status by income quintile tabulated from demographic health surveys in 44 countries; and (ii) our estimates of the health status of the poor in over 70 countries drawn from a new technique in decomposing social indicators. Our estimates confirm that the poor have significantly worse health status than the nonpoor and the regression results provide new evidence that public spending on health care matters more to them. However, the results suggest that increased public spending alone will not be sufficient to significantly improve health status.

This article examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending should be higher in more unequal societies due to median voter preferences. Alternatively, it can be argued that unequal societies may spend less, not more, on redistribution because of capital market imperfections. Based on different data sources, the cross-country evidence reported in the article supports the “imperfect markets” hypothesis, showing that more unequal societies do spend less on redistribution. The empirical analysis also takes into account the fact that the share of redistributive transfers in GDP is nonnegative.