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Using data from the Gallup World Poll and Latinobarometro, we examine the relationship between life satisfaction, vulnerabilities, and migration in Latin America. We look at three kinds of insecurities: nutritional, personal, and job insecurity. We find that controlling for income, migration experience by a household member increases life satisfaction of the respondent. We also find, however, that nutritional insecurities interact negatively with migration. In other words, hunger has a devastating effect on happiness, especially in households where a member is absent due to migration.
Introduction
Migration is an issue of major importance in Latin America. In data we discuss below, approximately a third of Latin American households report they either have a family member living abroad, or have had a family member living abroad in the last-five years. The impact of migration on the individuals who remain is of obvious interest. The bulk of the existing literature has looked at the effects of migration (and remittances) on some socioeconomic dimensions of the remaining family members. For example, Cox-Edwards and Ureta (2003) show that in El Salvador children in households receiving remittances are less likely to leave school, Hildebrandt and McKenzie (2005) find that in Mexican households with migrants, newborns are more likely to have higher birth weight and to be delivered by a professional doctor, and Lopez-Cordova (2005) concludes that in Mexican municipalities with more remittances infant and child mortality rates are lower. However, some papers show that migration has negative consequences such as less investment by parents in some health inputs or worse academic and social performance for children with one or both migrant parents (Hildebrandt & McKenzie, 2005; World Bank, 2006; and the citations therein). There is an intense controversy over these results in part because the standard econometric problems of reverse causality and selection bias that plague this literature.
A comprehensive assessment of migration is even more complex because some of its effects go beyond the realm of economic choices. Even if migration brings greater material opportunities, family disintegration can have negative effects on the quality of life. For example, Gunatilleke (1990) finds that in a sample of families from Sri Lanka who had a migrant, one-fifth reported new difficulties with children, including unruly behavior, poorer health, and signs of grief or depression. Evidence of this sort underscores the importance of looking at effects of migration on subjective self-assessments of well-being.
In this vein, while not looking at migration directly, the Inter-American Development Bank's remarkable synthesis of work on the "economics of happiness" as it applies to Latin America demonstrates the insights that can be gained from considering subjective assessments (Lora, 2008). For example, the "paradox of unhappy growth" suggests an explanation for why successful growth-promoting policies are not popular, even when they are Pareto-optimal: growth induces increases in expectations for economic prosperity that outstrip the recorded growth. Understanding the impact of migration on societies requires moving beyond externally verifiable measures to examine how people perceive their experiences.
The "Economics of Happiness" has launched a broad array of definitions of well-being or happiness (or life satisfaction). The goal is to craft policies to improve a broad definition of "Quality of Life," including domains ranging from employment to health to education. There is much variation in how researchers actually implement the notion of "Quality of Life" (QoL). A typical definition, from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (e.g. Fahey, Nolan & Whelan, 2003), considers QoL as the ability of people to attain the goals and choose the lifestyle that they want. In this paper, we use questions from polling data that ask for an overall evaluation of the respondents lives (we report the precise wording below). We will use "happiness," "satisfaction," and "well-being" interchangeably throughout in referring to this evaluative measure.
The relationship between happiness and migration is complex. The main direct channel through which migration can positively affect well-being is remittances, which provide income. (1) Apart from this effect, which we control for by including household income in the regressions, the other main direct effect is likely to be the insurance of consumption. For example, Yang and Choi (2007) show that in Filipino households having a migrant family member insures consumption against income shocks. Migration might have a negative impact on happiness similar to "loss of friendships," due to family fragmentation. As the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) volume documents (chapter 4), the loss of all friendships for the "average" person in Latin America has an impact on happiness equivalent to income falling to one-seventh the previous level. Therefore, migration could on net have a positive or negative impact on happiness of those left behind.
In addition to these two effects, it is possible that some vulnerabilities are exacerbated by family disintegration and the lack of immediate support. In this context, we are interested in the way in which migration indirectly affects happiness through the experience of vulnerabilities. In previous work, we looked at nutritional, job and personal (safety) insecurities and found that they negatively affected happiness, with nutritional insecurity having the strongest effect and personal safety insecurities the weakest (Cardenas, Di Maro & Mejia, 2008). In this paper we extend that work to look at the interaction effects of migration and vulnerabilities. While it is the case that migration might affect the experience of other socioeconomic factors that contribute to happiness, like age and education, we think that the interaction with vulnerabilities is one of the most interesting. This is because the main direct channels of migration on happiness--income and insurance--are likely to have strong indirect effects on vulnerabilities. In addition, the effects of actual occurrences of hunger, fear of job loss, or victimization on happiness can vary depending on whether the individual has a fragmented family.
To provide a preliminary answer to some of these questions, this paper explores the relationship between happiness and migration by examining representative individual and country-level data from the majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries. The data allow us to examine the impact of the different channels of migration on happiness: the loss of friendship channel and the income/insurance channel. In our empirical work we look at two measures of migration: having or having had a family member abroad and whether the household expects to receive help from abroad. We look at their impacts on happiness and also whether they exacerbate or mitigate the impacts of a variety of types of insecurities--personal, job and nutritional--on happiness.
We find that the "insurance" channel appears to dominate the "loss of friendship" channel and migration has a positive impact on the happiness of those left behind. Looking more closely at vulnerabilities, we find that migration increases the negative impact of nutritional insecurity on happiness but reduces the negative impact of job insecurity on happiness. Though we do control for a "personality factor," because we are not able to control for the selection process of individuals into migration, our results should be interpreted with caution.
The finding of a positive impact of migration on the life satisfaction of migrants households is at odds with recent findings by Borraz, Pozo and Rossi (2008) on migrants from Ecuador. They find that migration reduces the happiness of those left behind and that remittances do not compensate for the family disintegration. They use data from only two communities in Ecuador and so our results are potentially more representative of the "typical" Latin American experience. Our results are, however, consistent with the bulk of the literature that shows positive impacts of remittances and migration (difficult to separate in most cases) on an array of socioeconomic variables.
Data
We primarily use the Gallup World Poll survey. The poll includes questions on a wide range of life satisfaction dimensions (overall satisfaction with life, satisfaction with one's standard of living and satisfaction with freedom to choose what to do with one's life, among others). The poll also includes two kinds of questions related to migration and several measures of nutritional, personal and job insecurity. Though two waves of data are available for Latin American and Caribbean countries--2006 and 2007--unfortunately each survey covers different households so that the data does not have a panel structure. The survey covers 20 LAC countries: Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The survey includes about 1000 observations per country. We use data from both waves. Specific questions are discussed below.
We also use data from Latinobarometro. This is an annual survey with more specialized questions for studying perceptions in Latin America. We use the pooled cross section from 1995 to 2005 for 17 LAC countries (all of those in the Gallup survey except Belize, Dominican Republic and Guyana).
As described in the introduction, we are interested in the relationship between insecurity, migration and happiness. The Gallup World Poll and Latinobarometro provide a number of measures of each. We report and discuss the wording of each of the measures that we use.
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