Impact of Migration and Remittances on Children's Human Capital in Cambodia

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the impacts of migration and remittances on human capital development of left-behind children in Cambodia. It contributes new evidence to a controversial debate in the literature on long-term impacts of migration and of remittances on the children. This is from the perspective of education, health, and consumption in remittance-recipient households compared with those in non-recipient ones. It relies on pooled data from Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey of 2009 and 2014, each of which comprises around 12,000 households in both rural and urban areas across all 25 provinces there. To evaluate the impact on household educational investment, the study firstly uses Hurdle Regression to correct for endogeneity, then Generalized Linear Model to deal with non-normality and heteroskedasticity of error. To evaluate the influence of remittances on children’s health, a classic Two Stage Least Squares is employed. For the effect on consumption, a counterfactual scenario of no migration and no remittances is constructed and used as a benchmark to compare with actual recipient household conditions. Heckman Two-Step estimation is also applied to control for selection into migration. The principal findings, though not exhaustive, are as follow: (1) Even for a specific country, different methods used to examine the same issues can lead to conflicting conclusions. (2) Different timing in the receipt of remittances can significantly lead to different expenditure patterns. (3) Source of remittances matters more than their amount in term of impact on children’s human capital. (4) International remittances are found to have reduced household investment in children’s education. (5) Nevertheless, they tend to have a positively significant influence on children’s health outcome, nutrition, and general consumption. (6) Households indeed have prior purposes of sending migrants and receiving remittances and what types of expenditure remittances will be channeled toward. Policy intervention is encouraged to direct more of these financial aids towards long-term household investment such as agricultural and business activities and children.