Effect of Household Welfare on Migration Participation: Case of Kyrgyzstan

Asylgul Kanatbekova , Population and Development

Migration is a selective process and not everyone has equal access to it. The aim of the paper is to find out whether migration is affordable for everyone in the case of Kyrgyzstan or not since migration could help poor households to overcome poverty or still poor households are trapped under the condition of poverty and low emigration rate. The first approach is the absolute income of household per member adjusted through OECD equivalence scale, from this logic migration is a reflection of income maximization and it is predicted that poor households would have more incentive to migrate. The second approach is relative income, which estimates social inequality within the community and does it affect migration decision. In order to explain migration, it was used logistic regression with control variables. The results show that in Kyrgyzstan migration is the increasing function of income, while social inequality does not induce migration (it can be explained that households are settled in groups by income level). Paper finds poverty trap in income-migration relation.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy