costly nature of moving, poor farmers may well be excluded by the high-costs-high-returns
opportunities of migration, whilst better-resourced farm households are more likely to take
advantage of these strategies, which may represent an important route for enrichment through,
for example, raising agricultural productivity. It follows that determinants of household
choice (or chance) to have a migrant member will have simultaneous implications on the
productive capacity of source households and, overall, on the economic effect of migration-
strategy on people left behind.
By specifying a simultaneous framework of determinants and consequences of migration, this
study offers some new empirical evidence on the impact of domestic (temporary and
permanent) and overseas migration opportunities on the adoption of modern farming
technologies (as a proxy for productivity-enhancement capacity) in sending rural households.
We argue that the choice between temporary, permanent and international migration at
household level can provide an interesting ground of analysis to assess the role of entry costs
in shaping migration choices along with the potential non-monotonic economic impact of
these strategies on household members at origin. We do so through a twofold empirical
analysis: in first place we look at the determinants of household decision of having a migrant
member, whereby migration choice is mapped into the three categories of moving. After
showing the importance of heterogeneity of entry constraints - that take the form of wealth -
in shaping household migration behaviour, we estimate a simultaneous equations model to
assess the impact of the different typologies of migration on agricultural performance of
sending farm households.
We find that richer and large-holder households are more likely to participate in costly high-
return migration (i.e. international migration) and employ modern technologies, thereby
achieving higher productivity. Poorer households, on the other hand, are not able to overcome
entry costs of moving abroad and fall back on migration with low entry costs, and low returns
(i.e. domestic migration), which does not help them to achieve production enhancements.
The remaining portion of the paper is organised as follows. Section II draws on NELM
insights to briefly discuss migration as a costly household subsistence strategy that may lead
to complementarities or else trade offs between economic opportunities elsewhere and
productive activities at home. Section III discusses some specific feature of internal and
overseas migration in Bangladesh whilst in section IV we present the data set and descriptive
statistics of main variables used in the inferential analysis. Section V presents our estimation
strategy and empirical results and section VI concludes.