Migration, Remittances and Children's Schooling in Haiti

The paper by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Annie Georges and Susan Pozo uses data from the Latin American Migration Project for Haiti, which cover about 300 households and 1,575 individuals surveyed in 2000 and 2002. The authors analyze 328 children aged 6 to 17 and treat the receipt of remittances as endogenous. They run the analysis separately for the community surveyed in 2000 and for the two communities surveyed in 2002, and for all children and for children in households with no emigrant.

The authors find that remittances raise school attendance for all children in the first community regardless of whether the household has members abroad. In the other two communities, which lack easy school access, remittances raise attendance only among children in households without out-migration. They conclude that remittances offset the disruptive effect of out-migration on schooling and so contribute to human capital accumulation in the midst of extreme poverty. The communities were chosen for high migration, so the results do not represent the whole Haitian population.