Internal vs. International Migration: Impacts of Remittances on Child Well-Being in Vietnam

Abstract

This paper intends to contribute to the literature on the effects of domestic and international remittances on schooling and child labour. Using the information gathered in the 1992/93 and 1997/98 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys (VLSS), we examine separately the school attendance rates and the incidence of child labour in remittance recipient households, as compared to households where this income source is absent. We apply ordinary least squares regression for the two cross-sections and a fixed-effects linear regression for the panel, using as dependent variables the child labour and school attendance ratios of children in each household. Our results indicate that the average child belonging to a remittance recipient household has a lower probability of working and a greater probability of going to school. Although international remittances are found to have a stronger beneficial impact than domestic ones in the cross-sectional analysis, the panel analysis reverses this result, showing that the only significant impact stems from domestic remittances.