Short-term migration and consumption expenditure of households in rural India

Abstract

In 2007-08, short-term migrants constituted 4.35 per cent of the rural workforce. A total of 9.25 million households in rural India had short-term migrants.Using a nationally representative data for rural India, this paper examines differences in consumption expenditure across households with and without a household member who is a short-migrant. We use an instrumental variable approach to control for the presence of a short-term migrant in a household. We find that households with a short-term migrant have lower monthly per capita consumption expenditure and monthly per capita food expenditure compared to households without a short-term migrant. Short-term migrants are not unionised, they work in the unorganised sector, they do not have written job contracts and state governments are yet to ensure that the legislation protecting them are properly enforced. This could be one of the reasons why we do not observe higher levels of expenditure in households with such migrants.