Migration, occupation and education: Evidence from Ghana
Clotilde Mahé & Wim Naudé
#2016-018
We investigate whether the occupational productivity and employment
status of individuals living in a household with migrants differ from
those living in non-migrant households using the sixth round of the
Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS6) and the Africa Sector Database
(ASD). We find that rural households and households with a head in more
productive occupations are more likely to have migrant members, and that
rural households and households with a head who are waged-employed are
more likely to have a migrant than households with members who are
self-employed. While these findings are not suprising, we find some more
unexpected results. For instance, migrants do not always migrate to more
productive occupations; migration can result in downward occupational
mobility. Migrants in our sample do not send back much remittances.
Migrant-sending households in Ghana are in fact more likely to send
remittances to their relatives currently away, than to receive
remittances. In an attempt to explain these somewhat puzzling findings,
we argue that a motivation for rural households or households with a
head in a more productive occupation to send out relatives is to support
younger household members to pursue their education elsewhere. Migration
is therefore a long(er)-run income-and-occupational diversification
strategy of the more productively employed rural households in Ghana.
JEL Classification: O150, O180, R23
Keywords: migration, occupational choice, structural transformation,
Africa