The Effect of Labor
Migration and Remittances on Children's Education among Blacks in South
Africa
Yao Lu and Donald J. Treiman (UCLA)
ABSTRACT
This paper studies the effect of remittances sent home by
South African Black labor migrants on children’s schooling.
We use cross-sectional data from the 1993-1994 Integrated
Household Survey and panel data from 2002 and 2003 South
African Labor Force Survey. We find that both labor
migration and the likelihood of sending remittances home are
much more prevalent among Blacks than among other racial
groups, and thus restrict our study of the impact of
migration and remittances on children’s education to Blacks.
Receipt of remittances substantially increases the
likelihood that children are in school, through three
pathways: increased household educational spending, reduced
child labor, and mitigation of the negative effect of
parental absence due to out-migration. Also, remittances
sharply differentiate labor migrant households. Children in
households without remittances are disadvantaged compared to
recipient households, and in some respect are even worse-off
than their counterparts in nonmigrant households, primarily
due to the deleterious effect of parental out-migration with
no economic compensation. Sensitivity tests using
fixed-effect and random-effect modeling show that the effect
of labor migration and remittances is robust to unobserved
heterogeneity and relatively consistent across subsamples
and independent samples over time, although the negative
effect of living in households with out-migrants but no
remittances is substantially by 2002-2003, due at least in
part to relaxed migration policies after the breakdown of
apartheid. The paper also assesses the social consequences
of remittances. We find that remittances help reduce
intra-familial gender inequalities as well as inter-familial
SES inequalities in schooling.