Elsevier

Labour Economics

Volume 19, Issue 6, December 2012, Pages 870-880
Labour Economics

Migration and gender differences in the home labour market: Evidence from Albania

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2012.08.009 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper examines the role of migration in affecting the labour market opportunities of male and female household members left behind. We address this question by analyzing the impact of international migration flows from Albania, where migration is a massive and male-dominated phenomenon. We find that the labour supply of men and women responds differently to current and past migration. Controlling for the potential endogeneity of migration, estimates show that having a migrant abroad decreases female paid labour supply while increasing unpaid work. On the other hand, women with past family migration experience are significantly more likely to engage in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work. The same relationships do not hold for men. These results suggest that while left-behind women in Albania may take on the extra burden associated with the migration of male family members, they gain employment opportunities upon their return.

Highlights

► We study the impact of migration on the male and female labour supply at origin. ► We use detailed survey data from the 2005 Albania LSMS. ► We distinguish between current and past migration episodes of household members. ► We find that women may gain in the local labour market from (male) migration. ► We find no effect of migration of household members on the male local labour supply.

Introduction

There is a general consensus that international labour migration entails large socioeconomic changes in source communities. At the same time, the closely knit relationship between gendered aspects of migration, such as male-dominated migration, and economic development in countries of origin remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this issue by looking at the impact of international migration on labour supply by gender in Albania, a country where, despite a recent increase in female migrants, massive migration flows have remained over the years a predominantly male phenomenon (Stecklov et al., 2010).

Studies on the impact of migration on source households have often overlooked that expanding opportunities for migration will have consequences for intra-household allocation amongst members left behind well beyond the more familiar income effect (see Chen, 2006 for an exception). For instance, while the economic impact of emigration on non-migrant employment patterns, primarily through remittances, has been documented for several migrant-sending economies (Funkhouser, 1992, Rodriguez and Tiongson, 2001, Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2006), considerably less attention has been paid to the role of gender-specific migration behaviour in differently affecting the labour market opportunities of men and women in households at origin (recent exceptions are Lokshin and Glinskaya, 2009, Binzel and Assaad, 2011, and Mu and van de Walle, 2011). Theoretical analysis suggests that due to imperfect monitoring on the one hand, and increases in the household income through remittances on the other, male migration may lead to female bargaining empowerment in the control and allocation of resources at origin, resulting in gender differentials in labour supply behaviour (Chen, 2006, Lundberg and Pollak, 1993, Haddad et al., 1997).

We consider this question by analyzing differences in labour market outcomes across men and women in Albania according to their family exposure to international migration. Over the last 15 years Albania has experienced massive migrant outflows, primarily to Greece and Italy, driven by economic hardships during the transition process and fostered by geographic proximity and the liberalization of migration. Several studies have analyzed the welfare impact of migration and remittances on a number of outcomes such as income and investments in Albania (Miluka et al., 2010, Kilic et al., 2009, McCarthy et al., 2009, Zezza et al., 2005). However, little is known about the effects of migration decisions on the local labour market behaviour by gender. There is some evidence on the labour market performance of return migrants in Albania (Coulon and Piracha, 2005, Piracha and Vadean, 2010, Carletto and Kilic, 2011), but the impact of the male-dominated nature of Albanian international migration on the economic performance of the women left behind remains unexplored.

Based on unusually detailed data on the household migration status of both current and former household members from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey, this study provides new empirical evidence on the gender-differentiated impact of family migration exposure on the home labour market. In particular, the main contribution of our analysis is the distinction between heterogeneous forms of migration, namely current and past migration of household members, which typically entail different returns as well as different effects on total family labour supply. Following Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo (2006), we further distinguish between paid and unpaid work, in order to test whether the quality of women's work varies according to the nature of migration, as well as to account for the important role played by the informal sector in female employment. Since households are likely to self-select into sending migrants abroad based in part on unobserved characteristics, we use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate labour market outcomes by gender in both paid and unpaid jobs.

From a policy perspective, exploring the impact of Albania's out-migration on employment outcomes is revealing in terms of migrant contributions to household wellbeing and economic growth at origin (Lucas, 2005, Faini and Venturini, 1993). The policy implications are even more telling if a linkage exists between male-dominated migration and a process of gender empowerment at origin, defined by the ability of women to access local earning opportunities. More efficient allocation of women's skills in the labour market is largely recognized to be a building block in the development process of both high and low income countries, and higher female labour force participation is found to reduce poverty and improve living standards among women and future generations (e.g., Duflo, 2005, Duflo, 2003, Thomas, 1990). By exploring the effect of such a key aspect of modernization as economic migration on male and female labour supply, this paper also contributes to the broader literature on the impact of economic development on gender equity and female living standards (Munshi and Rosenzweig, 2006).

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the analytical framework, the background literature, and the context of our investigation. Section 3 presents data and descriptive statistics, while Section 4 illustrates our empirical strategy. Results are reported in 5 Results, 6 Heterogeneous effects on female labour supply, 7 Conclusions concludes. Additional empirical results are reported in the Online Appendix.

Section snippets

Background: migration and female labour supply

Migration strongly suggests the interdependence of work decisions within a family. Theoretical analysis, supported by empirical evidence, has shifted its view of migration from an individual decision-making process to a mutually interdependent decision within the family, intended to manage uncertainty, diversify income portfolios, and alleviate liquidity constraints (Stark, 1991, Yang and Choi, 2007, Mendola, 2008). However, it remains unclear how this cooperation operates within families, and

Data and descriptive analysis

The analysis in this paper is based on the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey carried out by the Albania INSTAT with technical assistance from the World Bank. Unlike previous household surveys, the 2005 LSMS provides unusually detailed information on the migration of both current and former household members from Albania to foreign countries. Moreover, the survey includes information on individual labour market status along with a wide range of demographic and

Empirical strategy

In order to test the linkages between migration and the home labour market, we model participation in the labour force by gender and predict the employment outcomes according to household migration experience. To do so, we use a discrete occupational choice model based on the extensive theoretical literature on labour market behavioural models (see Moffitt, 1999, Killingsworth and Heckman, 1986 for a review). According to these models, family member decisions about leisure time and labour

Results

We are ultimately interested in examining the impact of having a migrant household member on the relative and absolute female labour force participation in concomitant occupation opportunities (i.e., wage employment, paid self-employment and unpaid work). We first test for potential endogeneity of the migration variables through a Durbin–Wu–Hausman test. The Chi-square statistics are very high in almost all of the cases, suggesting that the null hypothesis that the migration variables are

Heterogeneous effects on female labour supply

It should be noted that the migration behavioural impact on female household members left behind may be at work through additional channels, such as a change in human capital accumulation or fertility choice on the one hand, or different economic and labour market environments through general equilibrium effects on the other. Although we do not engage with these mechanisms directly, we investigate heterogeneous effects across subgroups which may help in the interpretation of results. Table 7

Conclusions

This paper has examined the role of male-dominated international migration in shaping labour market outcomes by gender in migrant-sending households. Using detailed information on family migration experience from the 2005 Albania LSMS, we find different patterns of labour market responses across gender lines. Unlike earlier studies, we distinguish the income effect from the disruptive labour supply effect of household members’ departure by differentiating different types of migration and

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    We thank Carlo Azzarri, Massimiliano Bratti, Francesco Fasani, Juan M. Gallego, Talip Kilic, Francesca Mazzolari, and Barbara Petrongolo, as well as participants to the IMISCOE Conference in Durres, the II CEPR Meeting on ‘Transnationality of Migrants’ in Louvain-la-Neuve, the Fourth IZA/WB Conference on Employment and Development in Bonn, and the 2009 ESPE Conference in Sevilla for their useful comments and inputs. The usual disclaimers apply.

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