Abstract
The migration phenomenon has important implications in both the receiving and sending countries. Regarding developing countries, much less attention has been devoted to their role as receiving countries. This study focuses on Ecuador, a developing country whose migration inflows have significantly increased since its economy formally dollarized. The aim is to know how residents’ perceived life satisfaction is affected by international migration not only at an aggregated level but also at a disaggregated level (by gender, occupation, and nationality). To do so, a multiple-choice econometric model, a generalized ordinal logit, is estimated using pooled data from 2014 to 2015. Results evidence that the effect of international migration on life satisfaction is not linear: it depends on the individuals’ life satisfaction level. Moreover, results evidence that immigrants’ gender, nationality, and occupation matter when studying residents’ perceived life satisfaction. An increase in the share of male migrants is associated with low levels of life satisfaction of residents. While the increase of the share of some nationalities is associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, the increase of others is associated with higher or intermediate levels of life satisfaction. Interestingly, an increase in the share of working immigrants is not associated with low levels of life satisfaction of locals.
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Notes
The effects of migration on the origin country are beyond the scope of this study.
These studies were developed as part of the program called “Colombia and Ecuador: For a Soon and Solid Reunion” at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar.
Due to space limitations, only maps illustrating the percentage of migrants from Colombia in each canton and the percentage of active worker immigrants are included.
The implicit assumption here is that the distribution of migration in Ecuador did not change from 2010 to 2015.
The latest Ecuadorian National Equality Agenda for Human Mobility is available here: https://www.cancilleria.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/plan_nacional_de_movilidad_humana.pdf.
The Stata autofit option, part of the gologit2 routine, is used to identify the partial proportional odds models that fit the data.
Tables 7 and 8, which show the estimations with international immigration by country and occupation, present only the coefficient estimates of the variables of interest: countries or groups of countries and occupation status, respectively. The estimated coefficients corresponding to the control variables are not presented here due to space limitations. It is worth noting that the signs and significance of the estimates of those control variables are retained in those models.
To ease the interpretation, marginal effects higher than 10 are divided by 100 and then interpreted as percentage. As the marginal effects must sum zero, a re-scaling of the marginal effects does not affect results. In this manner, we avoid high percentages such as 3224% for Cuba, for example.
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Guevara-Rosero, G.C., Bonilla-Bolaños, A.G. Non-pecuniary Effects of Migration Inflows to Ecuador: Is Residents’ Life Satisfaction Affected?. Int. Migration & Integration 22, 1243–1270 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-020-00796-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-020-00796-9