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Collective Remittances and Transnational Coproduction: the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants and Household Access to Public Goods in Mexico

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Abstract

Migrant hometown associations (HTAs) are mobilizing collective remittances to improve social welfare in their countries of origin. This paper assesses the effect of transnational coproduction of public goods in migrants’ places of origin by studying the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants. The 3 × 1 Program is a national social spending program in which the Mexican local, state, and federal government matches HTAs’ collective remittances to improve public services through cross-border public–private partnerships. The statistical analysis across municipalities that do and do not participate in the 3 × 1 Program shows that coproduction improves citizens’ access to public sanitation, drainage, and water, although not electricity. Moreover, a negative and statistically significant interaction term between 3 × 1 Program expenditures and family remittances reveals a substitution effect: in the presence of transnational coproduction, migrant households are less likely to improve public goods using family remittance resources, but in the absence of 3 × 1 Program participation they continue to improve their hometowns with family remittances. This research offers a theoretical mechanism and supporting empirical evidence of an important kind of intermediary institution improving social welfare in migrant places of origin.

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Notes

  1. Cammett and MacLean (2011) conceptualize social welfare provision broadly “to include the direct delivery or indirect facilitation of services, programs, and infrastructure, which are aimed at promoting the well-being and security of the population” (Cammett and MacLean 2011, p. 4).

  2. See the 2011 Special Issue of Studies in Comparative International Development on “Political Consequences of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South,” for example.

  3. See Goldring (2004) for a discussion of the typological distinction between family and collective remittances.

  4. Notable exceptions include Levitt (2001), Ostergaard-Nielson (2003), Goldring (2002), Smith (2006), and Itzigsohn and Villacres (2008). See also Beauchemin and Schoumaker (2009) for a quantitative study of the effects of independent HTA investment on local development in Burkina Faso.

  5. The Programa para las Comunidades Mexicanas en el Extranjero (PCME) or the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad was created in 1991 by the PRI administration as part of the division of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The PCME was directed by ministry staff in conjunction with consulates and Mexican cultural institutes abroad and was designed to develop and maintain relations with emigrants from various social groups in the USA. The program focused on several different areas where services were provided to migrants in education, community, culture, sports, and business. The community program, in particular, focused on helping migrants form HTAs and state-level federations of clubs as well as promoting state offices for migrant affairs. One of the chief activities of Mexican state offices for migrant affairs was to collect information on immigrants’ whereabouts in the USA and publicize state-level matching funds programs in the states of Zacatecas, Guerrero, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Durango.

  6. Burgess (2005) and Duquette (2011) examine the effects of transnational coproduction on local democratic governance, participation, and accountability.

  7. As of this writing, the national co-financing program in El Salvador is no longer active.

  8. Efrain Jimenez, former president of one of the largest and most powerful federations of hometown associations from the state of Zacatecas helps countries, including the Philippines and Haiti, design their own versions of the 3 × 1 Program (personal correspondence, August 2013).

  9. Data calculated by author from municipal (INEGI 2000–2010; 2000; 2010) and 3 × 1 Program statistics (SEDESOL 2002–2008).

  10. See Burgess in this issue for an in-depth discussion of the likely set of factors that motivate migrant transnational participation in their countries of origin.

  11. For example, China has been very active in recruiting migrant HTAs, especially those in Europe, as partners in public goods provision. They were created with the support of the provincial governments and are more akin to business and investment bureaus than social clubs like the Mexican case (Nyı́ri 2001). El Salvador implemented a program similar to the 3 × 1 Program through the Social Investment Fund for Local Development (FISDL), which offered co-financing to Salvadoran communities and HTAs seeking to invest their collective remittances (Gammage 2006).

  12. Interview with Ms. Irma Hidalgo, director of the 3 × 1 Program, Mexico City, March 2009.

  13. Project data from HTAs and municipal governments during visits to coproduction municipalities in Jalisco and Guanajuato, February–August 2009.

  14. “Other” parties are the excluded group.

  15. For example, Magaloni et al. (2007) find that the PRI distributed National Solidarity Program (Pronasol) anti-poverty funds to municipalities depending on the degree of electoral competitiveness: in highly competitive districts they used public goods to mobilize swing voters, whereas in PRI strongholds they rewarded their loyal base of support with private goods. By contrast, Takahashi (2013) shows that policy and institutional reforms enacted during the period of democratization after Salinas left office in 1994 has limited the ability of politicians to manipulate social spending programs for electoral gain.

  16. Alternatively, I use a different measure of municipal electoral competition, the margin of victory, which captures the difference in the vote share between the winner of the election and the second-place finisher. There are no differences using this variable in the estimates and they are available by request.

  17. The approximately 400 municipalities that maintain the traditional institution of self-government called usos y costumbres are excluded from the analysis.

  18. The interaction term was also tested for water and electricity models, but yielded no significant results. Those models are not reported. Also, the interaction models were run separately with a dichotomous family remittances variable (increase = 1; 0 or no change = 0) and the effects remain statistically and substantively significant.

  19. Cases of corrupt 3 × 1 projects may influence immigrants’ remittance sending decisions and by extension, household spending on public goods.

  20. Note that the marginal effect changes signs from positive to negative at family remittance values of 3.3 and 2.6 % for sanitation and drainage, respectively.

  21. The dataset does not currently permit the analysis of individual project type and household access to select goods and services. Future research may wish to consider how different project investment has independent effects on change in coverage as well as whether some projects are more likely to be correlated with worse outcomes.

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  1. UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Lauren Duquette-Rury

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Duquette-Rury, L. Collective Remittances and Transnational Coproduction: the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants and Household Access to Public Goods in Mexico. St Comp Int Dev 49, 112–139 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-014-9153-3

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