with the propensity to migrate. These are proxy variables for ‘external’ migration networks
capturing the idea that members of the village who have already out-migrated may help drive
down some of the up-front cots of migration, as they share information about jobs in other
areas with their neighbours35.
Eventually, it is worth noting the effect of a “behavioural” variable such as the self-
assessment of the household poverty status on the propensity to migrate. Ceteris paribus,
being “self-poor” increase the propensity to migrate temporary (by 1.7 percentage points), is
not significant and negative for permanent migration, and significantly decrease the
propensity to migrate internationally (by 0.7 percentage points). This is consistent with all
argued above.
The former binary logit models estimated do not allow for all comparison among the relative
probability to migrate either temporary, permanently and internationally with respect to the
option of staying put. Therefore, a multinomial logit model is estimated.
Yet, as we already mentioned above, some households have more than one migrant belonging
to different categories or, differently said, migration typologies are not necessarily mutually-
exclusive within a same household. On the other hand, though, they are very different
household strategies each of which entails highly different patterns in terms of both
determinants and impacts on people left behind. Therefore - even if we are forced to overlook
potential interactions between household migration strategies - we argue it is reasonable to
kind of ‘order’ them in such a way that, if there is more than one migrant in the household,
international migration category will be always captured, followed by permanent migration
and then temporary migration36. This is to say that the dependent variable of the multinomial
logit is defined as follows:
Mij = 0, if household i has no migrant members;
Mij = 1 if household i has at least one migrant belonging to the jth category
where j = temporary migration without any permanent or international migrant; permanent
migration without any international migrant; international migration.
35 The literature on migration has largely emphasised the important role migration networks play in driving the
decision to move (Taylor et. al. 1996).
36 This is because the three types of migration involve different levels of investment costs (not only financial),
whereby international and temporary migration and the highest and the lowest tails respectively. In this sense, if
a household can afford sending a household member abroad, for example - which entails much higher costs and
returns than other migration types - it would be insignificant whether it has also a migrant moving temporarily.
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