Temporary work visas as US-Haiti development cooperation: a preliminary impact evaluation

Hannah Postel,Michael A Clemens

doi:10.1186/s40175-016-0070-x

Abstract

We report a small-sample, preliminary evaluation of the economic impact of temporary overseas work by Haitian agricultural workers. This work occurs in the USA in the context of a pilot program designed as a form of post-disaster development assistance to Haiti. We find that the effects of matching new seasonal agricultural jobs in the USA with Haitian workers differs markedly from the effects of more traditional forms of assistance to Haiti, in three ways: the economic benefits are shared roughly equally between Haiti and the USA; these benefits are very large, including raising the value of Haitian workers’ labor by a multiple of 15; and the portion of the benefits accruing to Haiti is uncommonly well targeted for the direct benefit of poor Haitian households. We discuss implementation challenges faced by the program and the potential for policies of this kind to complement more traditional forms of development and humanitarian assistance.JEL Classification: F22, O15, O22, R23

Highlights

The world’s poorest workers can experience life-changing increases in income by working abroad, even for a short time
We focus on three ways that temporary migration di ers from more traditional development assistance: the mutual economic bene t to both countries, the size of the income gains, and the direct bene t to poor families
Most of the resources transferred to Haiti directly bene t poor Haitian families, with the average e ect of doubling annual household income with 2–3 months of overseas work by one household member. This assesses the impact of migration to ll new agricultural jobs in the United States, not the impact of the project on all those it would wish to reach. These results suggest unexplored potential in fostering temporary labor mobility as a policy to assist the poor—a policy alternative with much larger and more direct bene ts at the margin than traditional aid, with direct economic bene ts to both the rich and poor country involved

Summary

Introduction

The world’s poorest workers can experience life-changing increases in income by working abroad, even for a short time This is because working in a rich country typically increases the economic productivity of low-income workers by 300–1,000 percent (Clemens et al 2016). Income gains of this magnitude suggest important potential for a new form of international humanitarian and development policy: fostering temporary labor mobility (Luthria et al 2006; Pritchett 2006) At this writing, New Zealand is the only country to experiment with building a seasonal labor mobility program explicitly as a form of development cooperation (Ramasamy et al 2008; Gibson and McKenzie 2014b). In general the economic e ects of seasonal and temporary migration have been little studied (Dustmann and Görlach 2016).a

Results

Discussion

Conclusion