Ghimire, Dirgha, William Axinn, and Prem Bhandari. 2017. “Social Change, Out-migration and Exit from Agriculture.” A paper presented at 2017 International Population Conference, Cape Town, South Africa (29 October -04 November 2017).
Presented At: Cape Town International Convention Centre -Roof terrace room (simultaneous interpretation) -Wednesday, 1 November 2017
Short Abstract
We examine the influence of outmigration and remittance on agriculture change in Nepal. The current literature offers two opposing views of the consequences of outmigration on agriculture change through (a) loss of farm labor and (b) loosening credit constraint. We argue and investigate that both of these mechanisms could operate at the same time. We hypothesize that
(1) lost farm labor due to outmigration is likely to encourage exit from farming, and (2) remittances from migrants facilitates investment in farm mechanization that substitutes farm labor and provides buffer from exiting agriculture.
Using multilevel dynamic models we estimated the effect of outmigration and remittance on exit from agriculture. The results show that outmigration increases the hazard of exit from agriculture. The amount of remittance, on the other hand, substantially decreases the hazard of exit from agriculture. These effects are robust against several key variations in model specification.
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