Short-term Migration Rural Workfare Programs and Urban Labor Markets - Evidence from India
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper provides some of the rst evidence that rural development policies can have fundamental e ects on the reallocation of labor between rural and urban areas. It studies the spillover e ects of the world's largest rural workfare program, India's rural employment guarantee. We nd that the workfare program has substantial consequences: it reduces short-term (or seasonal) migration to urban areas by 9% and increases wages for manual, short-term work in urban areas by 6%. The implied elasticity of unskilled wages with respect to short-term migration is high (-0.7).
منابع مشابه
Short-term migration, rural workfare programmes, and urban labour markets
Rural and urban labour markets in developing countries are integrated by migration flows, which respond to earnings opportunities at origin and destination. This is the core of the celebrated Harris and Todaro (1970) model, which shows how in equilibrium, migration flows equate expected wages between rural and urban areas. One important implication of this model is that changes in rural employm...
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