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Apr 1, 2017 - Mar 31, 2018

International Remittances and investment in education in Nepal

Leader

This study attempts to explore the human-capital investment behavior of rural-urban migrant households whose working members live abroad and identify whether the major motivation for their migration to urban areas was their children’s education.

 

We measure human-capital investment in terms of the level and budget share of expenditure on children’s education and the time the children spend studying at home. We hypothesize that migrant households have a higher level of investment in human capital in comparison to urban natives, despite similar or lower level of current welfare measured by income and consumption, and therefore their major motivation for migration is their children’s schooling; otherwise, we would not be sure whether their prime concern was children’s schooling. In this study, we use household survey data from newly developed urban areas of Nepal, which was collected by the authors through a nationally representative Nepal Remittance, Investments, and Urbanization Survey (NERIUS) in late 2011.

 

This case is particularly interesting, because during the past two decades Nepal has experienced rapid progress in school enrollment, phenomenal growth in work-related foreign migration and remittance inflows, and astonishing rural-urban family migration and urbanization, despite a decade-long civil conflict, and political and socioeconomic transition