Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

No abstract

This is a thoroughly revised version of Harvard University Migration and Development Program Discussion Paper 45. Two anonymous referees provided very helpful comments and suggestions.

No abstract

Th e article investigates the major rural income diversifi cation patterns and their determinants in the context of China. Based on the data from a rural household survey, we fi rst categorize the rural income diversifi cation patterns according to the industry and the location in which the income is generated. Th en we apply a Bayesian multinomial probit model to examine the determinants of various types of the rural income diversifi cation. Th e major results demonstrate that a larger family size stimulates households to undertake various income diversifi cation patterns, but its eff ects are discounted by an unproductive population structure within the household. Another interesting discovery is that a rural household chooses its income diversifi cation pattern by referring to the surrounding neighbourhood; when most farm families depend on off-farm activities to boost their income, the individual household is more likely to follow the surrounding households by participating in the off-farm or mixed income activities or to migrate out to earn its income.

No abstract

This article provides theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence that international migration decisions are influenced by relative as well as absolute income considerations. Potential gains in absolute income through migration are likely to play an important role in households' migration decisions, but international migration by household members who hold promise for success as labor migrants can also be an effective strategy to improve a household's income position relative to others in the household's reference group. The findings reported in this article provide empirical support for the hypothesis that relative deprivation plays a significant role in Mexico-to-U.S. migration decisions. The findings also suggest that this migration is an effective mechanism for achieving income gains in households that send migrants to the U.S. and that households wisely choose as migrants those of their members who are most likely to provide net income gains.

Forthcoming in Journal of Policy Modelling Remittances and Inequality Reconsidered: Direct, Indirect, and Intertemporal Effects The impact of migrant remittances on the size distribution of income in LDC rural areas has received growing attention in the economics literature because of the importance of migration income in rural household budgets, the contribution of rural income inequalities to overall income inequality, concerns for rural poverty, and investment and consumption linkages. Gini decompositions (Stark, Taylor, and Yitzhaki, 1986 and 1988; Adams, 1991) and comparisons of Gini coefficients with and without migrant remittances (Oberai and Singh, 1980; Knowles and Anker, 1981) produce conflicting findings with regard to the direct short-run impact of remittances on income inequality in different LDC rural settings. There are theoretical reasons to suspect that the direct impacts of migrant remittances do not capture the full short-run impact of remittances on income inequality. Income from labor migrants may contribute to household-farms' total income not only directly but also indirectly, by influencing income from other sources (i.e., crop income). In the long run, remittances may finance the accumulation of income-producing assets on household farms. By influencing the distribution of these assets, remittances may help reshape the distribution of total household-farm income over time. Non-unitary short-run impacts of migrant remittances on household-farm full incomes are ruled out by the neoclassical household-farm model (e.g ., see Singh, Squire, and Strauss, 1986), which disregards risk and assumes that rural markets (including credit markets) are complete and well-functioning. l Under these assumptions, the household-farm model is recursive: production decisions are independent of the household-farm budget constraint and of other sources of 1 Bardhan (1988) offers a critique of these assumptions of neoclassical household-farm models.