Chronic Poverty And Migration

In this empirical study we try to address and test the relationship between chronic poverty and migration in the Indian setup controlling for some social and physical capital like household education, caste, household occupation, household size, financial access and access to land. Based on the considerations and theory presented in the introduction, this study expects to validate the theory and obtain the following results: Poverty and Chronic poverty have a positive effect on migration wherein, in both cases migration rates seem to increase. Chronically poor people migrate less as compared to poor people, Controlling for factors( capital), the pattern/ relationship observed above holds true.

4.DATA AND METHODOLOGY

Chronic poverty in households

The Tendulkar poverty line adopted in the dataset has been used in this study to identify below poverty line households. This identifies the poor households in the dataset. Stunting among children under the age of fourteen as determined by WHO has been used as a measure of chronic poverty amongst these poor households as stunting means long term deprivation reflecting in household’s chronic impoverishment. Anthropometric analysis using the height for age index, an indicator of chronic malnutrition has been adopted to determine stunting at the individual level. This was further used to identify households with at least one stunted child, i.e. chronically poor households. The IHDS 2011-12 dataset collected detailed information regarding various aspects of migration in a household. Households with at least one migrated member in the last five years were identified and used for the

CP is calculated by identifying the poor households with at least one stunted child given their anthropometric data. Therefore CP takes a value 1 if the household is chronically poor and 0 if the household in not chronically poor or non poor. POOR is an inbuilt variable identifying the BPL( Below Poverty Line) households using Tendulkar Line. POOR1 captures the households which are poor (below poverty line), but not chronically poor therefore giving a value 1 to poor households and 0 to non poor and chronically poor households. This is done to remove the effect of chronically poor while measuring the relationship between poor and migration.

X contains the controls including HHEDUC, DB1,FM1,OCCUP,CASTE and NPERSONS for household i. HHEDUC is the highest education in the household determining the educational access of the household, DB1 is the variable recording credit taken by the household in the last five years, used here as a proxy for financial access, OCCUP is a constructed variable used to determine the different occupations based on the primary income source of the household, CASTE is a constructed dummy used to differentiate between lower and upper caste people and NPERSONS records the household size of each household