Migration and Technological Change in Rural Households: Complements or Substitutes?

As decomposed income flows are concerned, households with international migrant members
have the highest level of crop and agricultural income, and the lowest amount of off-farm
income (excluding remittances) with respect to all the other categories. As shares of total
income, though, the latter income flows represent a smaller percentage of total household
earnings than it is the case in the other groups; this is due to the significantly high amount of
remittances they receive from international migrants, which account for 60 percent of total
income. Moreover, as for farming investments, figures show that relatively few farmers with
temporary migrants adopt high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice, whilst the highest shares of
adopting households belong to the group with ‘international’ migrants and with ‘no-migrants’.
Thus, the crucial point here is to understand to what extent migration and remittances are
complementary to other productive assets and activities but, given the endogenous nature of
migration behaviour, descriptive statistics does not fully help in this regard.

Furthermore, it should be noted that also land ownership - which is a proxy for household
wealth - might be thought as endogenous but, given missing Bangladeshi land market, it can
be reasonably assumed exogenous. In order to focus on the relationship between land asset
and migration, Table 5 shows the distribution of the three types of migration by the standard
classification of land-size classes²³:

It is interesting to see that among families sending out migrants, near-landless do it mostly
temporarily, small farmers have mainly temporary and permanent migrants, and medium-
large farmers have a majority of permanent and international migrants. This is important in
the selection process of migration at household level.

²³ Near-landless have less than 0.049 acres; small farms more than that and less than 2.49 acres; medium-large
farmers have more than 2.5 acres. It is worth stressing that our dataset is skewed towards small and medium-
farmers, as there are only 17 sample farm households being ‘properly’ large, i.e. owning more than 7.50 acres of
land.

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