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Is Subjective Well-Being of Concern to Potential Migrants from Latin America?

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Abstract

This paper examines the effect of life satisfaction on intention to migrate abroad using survey data on 18 Latin American countries. Three key findings emerge that support life satisfaction as a significant driver of intention to migrate abroad. First, the findings suggest that reporting high life satisfaction is negatively associated with intention to migrate abroad controlling for education and other background factors. Second, I find a consistently negative and significant effect of the interaction between high life satisfaction and education suggesting that more educated individuals reporting high life satisfaction are less likely to consider migrating abroad as compared to more educated individuals reporting low life satisfaction. And third, even after controlling for consumption and relative deprivation the negative effect of the high life satisfaction and education interaction term on intention to migrate abroad remains statistically significant suggesting that international migration decisions of those with higher education are not solely driven by economic motives. In addition, I find that those who are highly educated (college and higher) are more likely to consider migrating abroad, holding life satisfaction, consumption, and relative deprivation constant, mainly due to weak economic outlook of and low wages in the home country.

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Notes

  1. The use of “consumption” instead of absolute income is explained in the methodology section.

  2. For a detailed review on consumption and relative deprivation and happiness see Clark et al. (2008).

  3. Diener et al. (1995) examine four subjective well-being surveys across 55 countries with a total survey sample of 100,000 respondents and find that different subjective well-being metrics and scales yield similar results across countries.

  4. Graham and Felton (2006) also use the Latinobarometro in their paper.

  5. Models using interaction between life satisfaction and education both as continuous variables were also estimated. The sign and significance of the interaction term coefficient remains the same. Results are available upon request.

  6. Confidence in public institutions is constructed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and includes confidence in—President, judiciary, political parties, and the Congress. Confidence in private institutions is operationalized using scaled responses to the question “private enterprise is indispensable for the development of the country”.

  7. As sampling design varied greatly by country and also by each wave, sampling design could not be incorporated in the analysis.

  8. Distance to the capital of United States is specifically included because the 2004 Latinobarometro asked respondents which country they thought of migrating to and the greatest proportion, 42 %, of potential migrants indicated that they intended to migrate to the United States.

  9. POUM captures the mobility that respondents expect in the near future. The question in Latinobarometro asks respondents’ expectations regarding their personal economic situation 1 year into the future.

  10. This resonates with previous literature which finds that individuals tend to cluster themselves around the middle rungs of the ELQ and very few report very low or very high ELQ (Ravallion and Lokshin 2001).

  11. In simple terms, the interpretation of the interaction term is, \( \begin{aligned} Migrate_{{\widehat{High\,Life\,Satisfaction}}} & = Coefficient_{High\,Life\,Satisfaction} + (Coefficient_{Years\,of\,Education} + Coefficient_{High\,Life\,Satisfaction*Edu} ) \\ & \quad + Years\,of\,Education. \\ \end{aligned} \)

  12. It should be re-emphasized that in the absence of actual income data, ELQ provides the closest approximation to compute the relative deprivation variable.

  13. Fixed effects are not explicitly specified in the models because cohort fixed effects are captured by the time invariant characteristics—country, gender, and age categories—used to define the cohorts.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Carol Graham, Melissa Kearney, Steve Heeringa, Madiha Afzal, and Kevin Jones and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments. I am also grateful to participants of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (2011) and the Fifth Southeastern International Development Economics conferences for their helpful feedback. All remaining errors are mine alone.

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  1. Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Namrata Chindarkar

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Chindarkar, N. Is Subjective Well-Being of Concern to Potential Migrants from Latin America?. Soc Indic Res 115, 159–182 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0213-7

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