Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union

Esther Mirjam Girsberger; Romuald Méango; Hillel Rapoport

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2019.10.002

Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union

Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Romuald Méango, Hillel Rapoport

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the impact of intra-regional migration on wage inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). We exploit unique data from a unified labour force household survey which covers natives and migrants in the seven economic capital cities of that region. We first estimate the counterfactual wage distributions of UEMOA migrants in absence of migration to evaluate the compositional effect of migration (i.e., when wages are treated as exogenous). We find that regional migration increases average wages by 1.8% and generates a decrease in inequality that ranges between −1.5% (for the Gini index) and −4.5% (for the interquartile ratio). This is essentially driven by a reduction in inequality between capital cities, while the effect of migration on within-capital cities inequality is heterogeneous across countries and remains small overall. Second, when accounting for possible general equilibrium effects of migration on stayers’ wages (i.e., when wages are treated as endogenous), we find similar to stronger effects on inequality, albeit with a smaller increase in the average wage.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	385-404
Number of pages	20
Journal	Journal of Comparative Economics
Volume	48
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2019.10.002
State	Published - Jun 2020
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors thank the associate editor, two anonymous referees and Denis Cogneau for comments. We also thank the Agence Française de Développement for its financial support (convention IRS/ECO/437-2017) and DIAL - especially Constance Torelli and Francois Roubaud - for making the 1-2-3-Survey data available. The authors are grateful to the National Institutes of Statistics from Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal who supply their data to IPUMS. The paper benefitted from comments from conference participants at the CISEA in Abidjan (2018) and the ECINEQ in Paris (2019).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Comparative Economic Studies

Keywords

Gini index
Interquartile ratio
Migration
Wage inequality
West Africa

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1016/j.jce.2019.10.002

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title = "Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union",

abstract = "We investigate the impact of intra-regional migration on wage inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). We exploit unique data from a unified labour force household survey which covers natives and migrants in the seven economic capital cities of that region. We first estimate the counterfactual wage distributions of UEMOA migrants in absence of migration to evaluate the compositional effect of migration (i.e., when wages are treated as exogenous). We find that regional migration increases average wages by 1.8% and generates a decrease in inequality that ranges between −1.5% (for the Gini index) and −4.5% (for the interquartile ratio). This is essentially driven by a reduction in inequality between capital cities, while the effect of migration on within-capital cities inequality is heterogeneous across countries and remains small overall. Second, when accounting for possible general equilibrium effects of migration on stayers{\textquoteright} wages (i.e., when wages are treated as endogenous), we find similar to stronger effects on inequality, albeit with a smaller increase in the average wage.",

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Regional migration and wage inequality in the West African economic and monetary union

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

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