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This paper uses a representative household-budget survey from the Asian Development Bank to analyse the determinants of international labour migration, distinguishing between seasonal and permanent (long-term) moves and comparing them with determinants of rural local income-generating activities in the Kyrgyz Republic. It has been found that both permanent migration and local nonfarm-wages employment substitute agricultural activities and attract the most educated rural individuals. The difference is that the permanent migration option is unattainable for individuals from poor households with small land holdings. They tend to engage in local nonfarm activities, while those who are educated and have resources to finance the cost of migration choose to leave the country for long periods of time. In contrast to permanent migration, seasonal migration does not require the possession of either higher or vocational education, which can make it potentially less harmful for local development in terms of brain drain.
Notes
We use the terms seasonal and circular interchangeably in this paper, but circular migration is a much wider concept and includes temporary migration with temporary return (seasonal), permanent migration with permanent return, permanent migration with temporary return and temporary migration with permanent return (see discussion in Erzan 2008).
Estimates of remittances from the ADB survey are lower than official estimates from the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic due to the incompleteness of information on amounts and economic nature of trans-border financial flows in the official methodology, but this is beyond the scope of this paper (ADB 2008a, 2008b).
Full-time students are not considered labour migrants.
Unfortunately, there is no distinction between farm and nonfarm wage in the data. However, we checked representative household budget surveys from the National Statistical Committee. Wage employment in agriculture accounted on average for only 2% of total rural employment in 2005. Therefore, in this study we consider all wage employment as nonfarm.
We excluded from estimation full-time students and pensioners.
Results are available upon request.
It is important to remember that virtually all rural residents in Kyrgyzstan had access to land. Those households who do not have land (about 9% in our sample) are probably those who worked in nonfarm sectors during the Soviet time (teachers, social workers) and were not members of state collective farms. They are not necessarily very poor and often have better education than those who have land.