Abstract
Historically, Guatemalans have suffered high rates of poverty and malnutrition while nearly ten percent of their population resides abroad. Many Guatemalan parents use economic migration, mainly international migration to the United States, as a means to improve the human capital prospects of their children. However, as this investigation shows, the timing of migration events in relation to left-behind children’s ages has important, often negative and likely permanent, repercussions on the physical development of their children. To illustrate these dynamics, this investigation uses an instrumental variables framework to disentangle the countervailing effects of Guatemalan fathers’ absences due to migration from concomitant remittances on left-behind children’s growth outcomes. Based on national-level data collected in 2000, the investigation reveals that the international migration of a father in the previous year is correlated with a 22.1% lower length/height-for-age z-score for the average left-behind child aged ≤ 3. In contrast, the receipt of remittance income has no influence on the physical stature of a child, which may indicate that migrant fathers with young children are not able to achieve economic success soon enough during their ventures abroad to fully ameliorate the harmful effects caused by their absences.
Highlights
Poverty and malnutrition, two diabolical conditions that often go hand in hand, remain rampant throughout much of the developing world
One of the first studies examining the health effects of migration and remittances on leftbehind family members was conducted by Kanaiaupuni and Donato [8] who found, based on Mexican Migration Project data from five Mexican states, that the short-term absence of the household head was correlated with higher incidences of infant mortality
4% of sampled Guatemalan children age 3 and under had a father residing abroad in 2000 and 6% of children lived in households that received international remittances
Summary
Two diabolical conditions that often go hand in hand, remain rampant throughout much of the developing world. One of the first studies examining the health effects of migration and remittances on leftbehind family members was conducted by Kanaiaupuni and Donato [8] who found, based on Mexican Migration Project data from five Mexican states, that the short-term absence of the household head was correlated with higher incidences of infant mortality. They noted that higher infant mortality was ameliorated when the household received remittances and/or lived in communities with well-established migration networks. The major difference between the two studies rests with the selection of remittance instrumental variables (IVs): Ponce et al (2011) used exogenous variation in transaction costs for international transfers whereas Anton (2010) used a combination of the number of Western Union offices per capita and the proportion of households with migrants by province
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