Does Internal Migration Improve Overall Well-Being in Ethiopia?

Featuring
Alan de Brauw
Senior Research Fellow
International Food Research Policy Institute

With Discussant
Kathleen Beegle
Senior Economist
Development Research Group, World Bank

At this October 24th MADS, Alan de Brauw will present a new paper in which he and his co-authors use a unique panel dataset of migrants and non-migrants from 18 villages in Ethiopia to examine the impacts of internal migration on objective and subjective measures of welfare. They find large gains to objective welfare measures such as consumption, of more than 280 percent. However, they find that migrants' responses to questions meant to measure subjective welfare, are similar to those of non-migrants. The low levels of migration, despite the large objective welfare gains, suggest that barriers within countries like Ethiopia prevent people from moving to places where they would be better off.

*The Massachusetts Ave. Development Seminar (MADS) is a ten year-old research seminar series that brings some of the worlds leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.