Migration and human development in Latin America: the longitudinal effect of low-skilled and high-skilled emigration in the sending countries

• Autor(a) principal: Figueroa, Ana Magdalena Figueroa
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/101/101131/tde-18042018-101133/
• topic: América Latina; Desenvolvimento humano; High-skilled emigrants; Human development; Latin America; Low-skilled emigrants; Migração; Migrantes altamente qualificados; Migrantes pouco qualificados; Migration; Países de origem; Sending countries

This research aims to study the dynamic effect of emigration on the human development of the sending countries. For this, emigration is measured through low-skilled and high-skilled emigrants, as well as remittances. Additionally, human development is understood as having a decent standard of life, long healthy life, and education. This research is not concerned with why migrants choose to move. Instead, the concern here is to assess what happens to the human development of the sending countries when they exit their home countries. This work is based on the New Economics of Migration theory and uses Latin America as the sample of sending countries. The data are analyzed through Feasible Generalized Least Squares, Panel Corrected Standard Errors, and GMM-IV. The period covered in this research goes from 1970 to 2015. 5-year-averages are employed in order to calculate the long-run effect of emigration on human development. From the results obtained through the statistical analysis, it can be said that the impacts of emigration on human development are heterogeneous, and that depend on the type of emigration (high-skilled or low-skilled) and on time (short-run or long-run). The findings suggest that there are important short-term benefits of emigration on the access to a decent living standard and to education. However, there are also some worrying negative short-term effects, mostly on a long healthy life. Nevertheless, most of these negative short-run effects revert in the long-run and become more positive. Furthermore, the results show that high-skilled emigration has more positive effects on living standards and on a long healthy life than the low-skilled emigration. On the other hand, in the case of education, it seems like low-skilled emigration has more positive long-run effects when compared to the high-skilled one.