The Impact of Parental Migration on Education of their Children: Case of Tajikistan

Abstract

There is a growing concern that parental migration has a complex range of social and economic impacts on the lives of children who remain in the origin household. This paper examines the effects of the migration activities of parents on the education of the left behind children in Tajikistan, a country with very large number of labor migrants abroad. With the use of panel data from the Tajikistan Living Standards Measurement Survey 2007 and 2009, quantitative research is conducted. Since the impact can differ, depending on whether a mother or a father is a migrant, the study examines separately the relationship between paternal migration and education of his children and maternal migration and her children’s education. For the purpose of obtaining more reliable results and avoiding possible endogeneity problem, both Random Effects (RE) estimations and Instrumental Variables (IV) are used as empirical strategy, using GDP per capita and employment conditions in the destination cities as instruments. Schoolchildren are focused on and school enrollment is used as the main measurement for children’s education. In addition, the effect of remittances on educational spending is examined using Fixed Effects (FE) and IV estimation methods. The RE and IV estimations results show that there is negative relationship between parental migration and school enrollment of children, and the results are significant for parental migration as well as for paternal migration separately. The FE and IV results for the impact of remittances on educational expenditure also claim to be negative and significant, indicating that a 1 TJS increase in remittances leads to 0.0019 TJS decrease in educational expenditure according to FE and 0.0056 TJS decrease in educational expenditure according to IV estimations.