Migration Choices, Inequality of Opportunities, and Poverty Reduction in Nicaragua
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Accordingly, there were 234,328 Nicaraguan migrants in the United States in 2000, which represents 4.5 percent of the current Nicaraguan population. 5. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama. 6. There is no information in the 2005 LSMS about seasonal migration. The number of household members who were absent less than nine months, which could serve as a proxy, represents 7 percent of the population. 7. The survey, however, does not include information on the purpose of these absences or the destination. 8. CEPAL (2007) has estimated that irregular migration could be of equal size to that of the migrant population captured by the Costa Rican Census in 2000. 9. This predominantly urban feature is different from the characterization found in other Central American countries, where most migrants are from rural areas (CEPAL 2006). This may be due to the fact that the 2005 LSMS does not provide information on seasonal migrants, who are more likely to come from rural settings. 10. Clearly there is a reverse causality and endogeneity problem here. It may be the case that the higher wealth status of migrants can be the result of migration rather than the other way around, or that some unobserved factors (such as entrepreneurship) influence both wealth status and migration propensity. Assets owned in a household reflect long-term welfare status and thus are less likely to be affected by migrants’ departures. In the empirical analysis of conditional distributions, migration decisions are conditioned on household assets owned before the migrant’s departure. The asset index was constructed by the principal components method and includes variables about the dwelling conditions (owning, material of roof, floor, access to water, etc.) and possession of different housing assets (TV, radio, microwave, motorcycle, bicycle, etc.). 11. The exclusion of migration to other countries as a choice does not affect the results of the analysis. 12. A more detailed explanation of the conceptual framework is found in the Annex, where the complete results of the multinomial choice model under different specifications are presented in Table 5A.1. 13. This assumes that access to social services can proxy access to transportation networks, which is plausible because this distance was measured by a compound index of the distance and time from the household to the closest school and medical center. 14. These results are obtained by estimating the multinomial logit for male and female individuals separately. 15. The role of natural disasters is shaping migration flows. This was recognized in 1998, when Costa Rica granted legal status to 152,000 immigrants after Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua (Bail 2007). Baez and Santos (2006), using the