Migrants' Home Town Associations and Local Development in Mali

Abstract

International audienceThis paper explores the impact of Malian migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) located in France on the provision of local public goods in Mali. To this end, we compute an original dataset on all the HTAs that have been created by Malian migrants in France since 1981 and geo-localize their interventions on the Malian territory. Thanks to four waves of Malian census, we also build a panel dataset on the provision of a range of public goods in all Malian villages over the 1976-2009 period.These two sources of data allow us to implement a difference-in-differences strategy, and to comparevillages with and without an HTA, before and after HTAs developed their activity in Mali. We find that Malian HTAs have significantly contributed to improve the provision of schools, health centersand water amenities over the 1987-2009 period. When looking at the timing of the treatment, we observe that the difference between treated and control villages in terms of water amenities is mainlydriven by the second period of observation (1998-2009), while schools and health centers exhibit significant differences during the whole period.Nous analysons l’impact des associations de migrants (AM) de Maliens vivant en France sur la disponibilité en biens publics au Mali. Pour ce faire, nous avons constitué une base originale dedonnées qui recense l’ensemble des AM maliennes enregistrées au Journal Officiel français depuis1981 et qui géo-référence leurs lieux d’intervention. Cette base est couplée avec quatre recensementsexhaustifs qui permettent de connaître la disponibilité en biens publics de chaque village malien de 1976 à 2009. En mettant en oeuvre une estimation en double différences, nous montrons que les AM maliennes ont significativement contribué à l’augmentation du nombre d’écoles, de centres de santé et d’adduction d’eau sur la période 1987-2009. Plus précisément, on observe que la différence entre le groupe de villages traités et le groupe de contrôle concernant l’adduction en eau est dû à des investissements menés durant la seconde période (1998-2009) tandis que les financements des AMconcernant les écoles et les centres de santé ont eu lieu tout au long de la période 1987-2009

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