Does Rural–Urban Migration Improve Employment Quality and Household Welfare? Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Urban migration unlocks new employment opportunities for rural dwellers in a productive manner. This study assessed the quality of employment of migrant workers, and its effect on rural households’ welfare. To this end, we used primary data collected from the four major districts of Lahore, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, and Sialkot in Punjab, Pakistan. These data include 504 immigrant and non-immigrant families in rural areas, and 252 migrant workers in urban destinations. We use IV probit and two-step sequential estimation methods for the empirical analysis. The study provides new insights for migration in Pakistan. First, migrant workers are better off in their new urban settings in terms of improved incomes and living conditions, but their social protection status is still poor. Second, the results of the employment quality models show that migration is a successful strategy for rural households to improve the quality of their employment. In addition, the characteristics of migrants and native households affect the relative improvement in the quality of employment and migrants’ conditions. Third, the results of the propensity score matching technique suggest that migration has a positive impact on rural households’ income, and these impacts are more pronounced in large cities. Based on the findings, the study recommends that the government should invest in quality education in rural areas, and ensure that social security schemes are provided for migrant workers in urban areas.

Migration, Labor Mobility and Household Poverty in Nigeria: A Gender Analysis

“…However, the likelihood of male labour mobility would also rise by 2.78 percent with an increase in the mean per capita expenditure of households. This agrees with previous studies (Young 2013;Ghebru et al 2018;Mukhtar et al 2018) that opined that migration comes with a cost, and household wealth status influences mobility.…”

“…We hypothesised that labour mobility (LM i ) is a function of the migrant's household characteristics (MHC i ) such as household size, ownership of (non) agriculture land etc., migrant characteristics (MC i ) such as age, years of education, access to media (AM i ) such as radio, television, ownership of mobile phone, location dummies (LD i ) such as region and area of residence and indicators of the wealth of the household (WD i ) proxied with per capita household expenditure; µ is the error term. Following on from previous studies (Amare et al 2012;Mukhtar et al 2018), we modelled labour mobility as: 1, if migrant is working after migration and 0 if otherwise.…”

Moving to dangerous places

“…Rural areas often do not provide full employment for everyone of working age (Singh, Singh, & Singh, 2015;Yeboah & Jayne, 2018). People's capacities and capabilities are under-utilised (Mukhtar et al, 2018). Employment in these areas is also often limited to one or a few sectors.…”

Employment Diversification Patterns in Pakistan: Empirical Assessment Revisited

“…(Xiao et al, 2018;Batool & Jamil, 2019) examined the drivers of industrial diversification. Dey (2018) explained that employment diversification reduces the poverty among the small and marginal landholders that further explained by Mukhtar et al, (2018) by accommodating the impact of rural-urban migration on employment quality and household welfare. Jan et al, (2012) explained the drivers of rural employment diversification in the North region of Pakistan and the Globalization was concluded as the significant factor for economic growth, provides equal opportunities to all the nation and the basis to diversify the choice of work for inclusive growth of a country.…”