Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since the access to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, Mexico experienced a radical reshape of its economic geography.  Recent empirical evidence suggests that this process has led to increasing spatial inequalities in income and human development and to a pattern of regional divergence in growth rates. In the context of spatial differences in living standards and opportunities, migration is one strategy people can use to improve their lives and to access higher incomes, better public goods and services, and a safer environment from conflict, natural disasters, or other hardships. In general, the literature on migration determinants has given more attention to destination characteristics (pull effect) than to origin characteristics (push effect). Local characteristics at origin, however, may act not only as a push, but also as a constraint to people’s ability to move elsewhere, by increasing migration cost.

In this paper I investigate whether the characteristics of the place where someone is born affect the decision to emigrate, over and above the role played by individual characteristics, for internal migrants in Mexico for the period between 2002 and 2005. I define migration as the movement of people from one municipality to another, lasting for more than a month, excluding changes of residence within Mexico City or other metropolitan areas. The migration decision is analyzed at the level of the individual, as a function of pre-migration individual, household and place characteristics. In order to control for pre-migration characteristics, so as to avoid confounding, I focus on working-age first-time migrants, that is, individuals with no history of migration in 2002 and who have changed municipality by 2005. They are compared to working age people who, as of 2005, have never moved. I use the rich data of the Mexican Family Life Survey and multilevel modeling techniques, which allow accounting simultaneously for the role of individual and place characteristics, and their interaction, in people’s migration decision.

Results indicate that characteristics of the place of origin are indeed a main factor explaining the probability of migrating internally, accounting for between 7% and 15% of the residual variation in individual migration propensity. Opening up the black box of place heterogeneity, emigration decreases significantly with the provision of public services and amenities such as higher education, public transport and sporting facilities. On the other hand, the local level of social conflict, proxied by the victimization rate in the community, significantly increases the probability of emigrating. The policy implication is that cross-cutting, spatially neutral development policy approaches aimed at fostering unimpeded mobility (such as those proposed by the World Bank in their 2009 World Development Report) would be insufficient for providing equal access to emigration across regions, and that a combination of place-based and people-based policies would be needed to improve living standards in poorer regions.