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So Dissatisfied to Leave? The Role of Perceptions, Expectations and Beliefs on Youths’ Intention to Migrate: Evidence from a Developing Country

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Abstract

This study analyzes the extent to which Uruguayan youth’s economic dissatisfaction drives intention to migrate by exploring those factors that can affect people’s economic satisfaction. Causality is explored using instrumental variable analysis and conditional mixed process estimations. The findings of this study point to a causal negative relationship from economic satisfaction to youth’s desire to migrate in which economic satisfaction is instrumented through the ratio of an individual’s personal income relative to the average income of a certain reference group; specifically—individuals with the same education level. Also, results highlight the importance of individuals’ perceptions of the opportunities available in the country regarding social mobility, job access, housing and adequate income, in shaping youth’s reported economic satisfaction and therefore their desire to migrate.

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Notes

  1. See Ivlevs (2014) for an extensive literature review.

  2. See Dolan et al. (2008), Van Praag et al. (2003) and Graham and Pettinato (2001). In particular, Layard (2005) refers to the ‘Big Seven’ factors that determine happiness, which in order of importance are: family relationships, financial situation, work related, community and friends, health, personal freedom and personal values.

  3. Other studies consider alternative domains of individuals’ well-being affecting intention to migrate, such as: quality of institutions and public goods (e.g. social protection, safety, in Van Dalen and Henkens 2013); housing, neighborhood or community issues (Fang 2006; Lu 1998, 1999; Clark and Ledwith 2006, quoted in Kley and Mulder 2010).

  4. This study focuses on economic satisfaction instead of life satisfaction because the survey used in this analysis does not ask about life satisfaction.

  5. Exceptions are Ivlevs (2015), in which causality from life satisfaction to intention to migrate is analyzed for a broad set of European and Central Asian countries; and Mara and Landesmann (2013) who focus on Romanian immigrants' preferences to stay in Italy, return or out-migrate.

  6. See Pellegrino et al. (2005).

  7. The economic stagnation that started in the sixties and the social and political crisis experienced during the seventies, in which a dictatorship was set up, are the main factors explaining emigration. However, after democracy was restored, the negative migratory balance could still be observed.

  8. As in Easterly (2001), in this paper the terms happiness, SWB and life satisfaction are used interchangeably. Also, see Kahneman (2000) for a broad discussion related to the concepts of utility, happiness and subjective well-being.

  9. For an exhaustive review of this literature, see Ferrer i Carbonell (2005, 2013) and Dolan et al. (2008).

  10. See Dolan and Lordan (2013) for a review of studies which consider alternative reference groups.

  11. Ferrer i Carbonell (2013) provides a detailed review of the ongoing controversies in the literature.

  12. An extensive overview of this literature is provided in Clark and D'Ambrosio (2015).

  13. Another branch of the literature analyzes whether, in destination countries, migrants are less happy than natives, and whether migration makes people who move happier (see for example Van Praag et al. 2010).

  14. This study considers 154 countries from around the world.

  15. Ivlevs (2015) uses as instruments parental education and whether the individual had a family member killed or injured in the Second World War.

  16. Mara and Landesmann (2013) consider being owner of one’s place of residence and individuals’ civic participation.

  17. According to the National Youth Institute of Uruguay, young people is defined as those aged 14–29.

  18. The translated question reads as follows: Have you ever thought of living abroad, even if temporarily?

  19. A detailed description of these variables is provided in Sect. 4.3.

  20. See Roodman (2010).

  21. Almlund et al. (2011) define extraversion as “An orientation of one’s interests and energies toward the outer world of people and things rather than the inner world of subjective experience; characterized by positive affect and sociability” (p. 11).

  22. An example of studies addressing endogeneity with panel datasets is found in Czaika and Vothknecht (2014) in their analysis of internal migration and happiness in India.

  23. The advantage of cmp versus an independent estimation of equations or 2SLS is due to the fact that the economic satisfaction variable enters the migration intention equation simply as an explanatory and categorical variable, without controlling for the unobservables affecting economic satisfaction, whereas with a cmp the predicted value of economic satisfaction is considered. Usually, such an approach produces unbiased and more efficient estimates, especially if the error terms are assumed to be normally distributed (see Roodman 2010).

  24. Despite the great economic expansion of the country over the period, the youth unemployment rate was more than double the average unemployment rate of the country.

  25. It is worth highlighting that variables reflecting people's opinions and expectations were tested as possible instrumental variables. However, the large standard errors of the estimated coefficients of economic satisfaction in Eq. (1) signal possible weakness of these instruments. Also, when opinion variables were included in both equations, no statistically significant effects were found in Eq. (1).

  26. Classifications of current and future household situation are made through individuals' self-assignment on a 1–10 scale, in which poorest households take a value of 1 and the richest 10.

  27. The translated question reads as follows: do you think that a person who is born poor and works hard can be rich?

  28. The question that addresses the causes of wealth is translated as: Think of rich people in Uruguay. Do you think the main reason they are rich is because: (1) they took advantage of the opportunities they had, (2) are capable, intelligent people, (3) they made huge efforts, (4) had luck, or (5) inherited a lot of wealth.

  29. Note that estimated coefficients do not vary substantially across the alternative specifications, while standard errors being lower than in the base model suggest that identification problems are not likely to arise (Table 3).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Also, to Andrea Vigorito, Martín Leites, Matías Brum and Mariana Zerpa, for reading early versions of this paper; and to participants of the 23rd Annual LACEA-LAMES Meeting for insightful comments. I acknowledge financial support from the Uruguayan’ National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII: Agencia Nacional de Investigación). Award number: PD_NAC_2015_1_107696.

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  1. Instituto de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración, Universidad de la República & EQUALITAS, Gonzalo Ramírez 1926, C.P. 11200, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Luciana Méndez

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6 and 7.

Table 5 Intention to migrate and HDI in Latin American countries.
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Table 6 Reported motives for migration by age cohort and educational level.
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Table 7 Simple probit. Intention to migrate
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Méndez, L. So Dissatisfied to Leave? The Role of Perceptions, Expectations and Beliefs on Youths’ Intention to Migrate: Evidence from a Developing Country. J Happiness Stud 21, 2981–3006 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00210-x

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