Notes

However, remittances may dampen labor supply among Kyrgyz households with international migrants. Larger disposable income as a result of remittances can have a negative impact on the incentives to work for nonmigrating family members.7 This effect could thus reduce the labor supply and increase households’ economic dependency on remittances. At the same time, by sending remittances back home, migrants can help family members left behind accumulate capital to start working as self-employed. The economic literature in other countries has mostly found negative effects of male migration overseas on women’s labor supply at home, while the impact on men left in the country is less clear (Lokshin and Glinskaya 2009, for Nepal; Binzel and Assaad 2011, for Egypt; Mu and van de Walle 2011, for China; and Mendola and Carletto 2012, for Albania). According to the Kyrgyz Integrated Household Survey, only 63 percent of heads of households in the Kyrgyz Republic with migrants abroad worked in 2018, compared to 79 percent of head of households without international migrants. Controlling for differences in individual socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, education, and the region of residence, heads of migrant households are 11 percentage points less likely to be employed than in nonmigrant households. This result is similar to findings of past studies in the country (World Bank 2015). When looking at the employment rates of all nonmigrant members of the household, those who have a family member abroad are 5 percentage points less likely to have a job. Using a gender dimension, Karymshakov and Sulaimanova (2017) also find that women in migrant households are more likely to report having unpaid family work and increase the time for housework at the expense of less hours of work outside the home. Overall, there seems to be a negative correlation between migration and labor supply of family members in the Kyrgyz Republic, although a causal relationship has not been established.

NOTES

1. The difference in the estimated stock of migrants from the Kyrgyz Republic between the two sources is primarily driven by the fact that the KIHS only captures short-term temporary labor migration by individual households, while excluding migrants that left the country for a longer period of time or for purposes other than for work, and entire households that left the country (World Bank 2015; Dubashov, Kruse, and Ismailakhumova 2017). In contrast, the DESA database considers all migrants from the country that are overseas.

Beishenaly et al. (2013), relying on experts’ evidence, increase the estimates of the stock of

Kyrgyz emigrants up to 1 million (box 1.1). 2. Based on data from the KIHS, and controlling for differences in age, gender, year, and region of residence. 3. Perhaps the most important survey on adult skills in OECD countries is the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. 4. In Eastern Europe, results show substantive income premia for return migrants, ranging from 40 percent in Hungary (Co, Gang, and Yun 2000), 10 to 45 percent in a selected group of EU New Member States (Martin and Radu 2010), to almost 100 percent in Albania (Coulon and Piracha 2005). 5. For a recent review of the international literature on the topic beyond the Kyrgyz Republic, see Bossavie and Özden (2022). 6. While migration is a prevalent phenomenon in the country, it is mostly temporary, and the actual outflows of longer-term migrants that are reflected in the statistics on net migration flows are rather limited. 7. For example, the wealth effect can increase the reservation wage of household members.