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Tajik labour migrants and their remittances: is Tajik migration pro-poor?

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14631377.2012.647630

1465-3958

Kazuhiro Kumo,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Abstract During the four years since 2006 Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, has led the world in the receipt of foreign remittances as a proportion of GDP. Needless to say, the key reasons for this are the low income levels in Tajikistan and the country's special relationship with Russia, which has been enjoying rapid economic growth. Yet while interest in the relationship between migration and foreign remittances has existed for a long time, not many studies have looked at this region. This article uses household survey forms from two points in time to profile households in Tajikistan and international labour migration by Tajiks, and examines the relationship between household income levels in Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, and foreign remittances received from international labour migrants and the likelihood of migrants being supplied. It finds no correlation between household income levels and amounts of money received from abroad, which suggests that altruistic models of the relationship between migration and remittances do not apply. Moreover, it also finds that households with high incomes are more likely to supply migrants, indicating that international labour migration from Tajikistan may not be pro-poor. Acknowledgements A draft of this article was presented at a regular study meeting of the Insitute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University on 5 January 2011 and at a workshop at the Karelian Insitute, University of Joensuu, Finland on 8 March 2011, and the author received numerous valuable comments. In parrticular, the author would like to thank Takashi Kurosaki, Naohito Abe, Chiaki Moriguchi, Masaaki Kuboniwa and Ichiro Iwasaki for their advice. This article represents part of the results of a 2010 research project subsidised by the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Foundation. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Keizai Kenkyu (Economic Review) of Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University in Japanese. Notes 1. Figures for remittances by workers and compensation for employees were drawn from balance of payments figures from the World Bank to make estimates of foreign remittances. ‘Compensation for employees’ refers generally to total gross wages paid by employers to employees but in this case, when discussing migrants' remittances, the term ‘compensation for employees’ means wages paid by foreign/international-based organisations to Tajiks working in Tajikistan. 2. In 2008 Tajikistan was 28th in the world for the receipt of foreign remittances, and received less than a fifth of the amount sent to the Philippines, which came fourth behind India, Mexico and Nigeria. See World Development Indicators 2009, World Bank. 3. In 2007 there were only 17,300 Tajiks who had entered Russia and gave their permanent residence as Russia (see SNGSTAT Citation2008), so the difference between this figure and the figures in Table 2 is worthy of attention. In addition, it is quite possible that destination registered on departure will differ from the final destination country where residence is actually registered. As a result, a migration matrix based on the country of departure will differ from one based on the country of entry. The United Nations (Citation1998) performed a detailed study of the problems with emigration and immigration statistics. 4. Also see CISSTAT (Citation2010). 5. Federal'nyi zakon ot 18 iyulya 2006 g. N 109-FZ ‘O migratsionnom uchete inostrannykh grazhdan i lits bez grazhdanstva v Rossiiskoi Federatsii’ http://base. garant. ru/12148419/. Residence for immigrants without visas (which include Tajiks) no longer required a permit, only registration. In addition, employers were allowed to hire any foreigner with a work permit. They no longer needed to hold a licence to hire foreigners themselves. 6. Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union regulations making it easier for Tajiks living abroad to return home were introduced, a treaty with the aim of elevating the status of expatriate Tajiks in the countries in which they were living was concluded, and so on. However, a review of government releases from the Republic of Tajikistan and the Russian Federation as well as the GARANT legal database did not turn up any laws and regulations that would really encourage migration. On 18 August 2010 Mr Kuggusov, head of analysis at Tajikistan's Ministry of Labour and Social Security, told the author that his government did not actually have a policy concerning labour migrants. On the same day Mr Sanginov, the first deputy minister at the ministry, said that Tajikistan did not compile statistics on the departure and entry of its citizens. He told the author that the government did not have any figures for international migrants at the national level, and that they did not have the ability to manage them even if they did. Even so, there are reports that the Tajikistan prime minister asked his Russian counterpart for a quota of 800,000 migrants (RIA Novosti, 23 January 2007, in Russian). 7. Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel'stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel'stvom Respubliki Tadzhikistan o trudovoi deyatel'nosti i zashchite prav grazhdan Rossiiskoi Federatsii v Respublike Tadzhikistan i grazhdan Respubliki Tadzhikistan v Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Dushanbe, 16 Oktyabrya 2004 g.), http://mirpal.org/files/files/coΓπ%20тp%20MΓ%20PΦ%20PT.doc. For more details see Ryazantsev et al. (Citation2010). 8. During the Soviet era a unified wage structure existed throughout the Soviet Union, and income disparities were far smaller than the differences in regional per capita GDP shown in Figure 3. In 1980 the average wages of all employees and workers provided in official tables for the Soviet Union were only 1.22 times higher in the Russian republic than in the Tajik republic, and by 1990, at the end of the Soviet era, the multiple had climbed only to 1.43 (TsSU SSSR, Narodnoe Khozyaistvo SSSR 1990, 1991, p. 38). 9. In 2008 per capita gross domestic income (shown in the Purchasing Power Parity table for that year) in Tajikistan was $1860, around the same level as Nigeria, Sudan, Cambodia and Senegal (World Development Indicators 2009, World Bank). 10. Olimova and Bosc (Citation2003) used an IOM-led survey of 4000 individuals conducted in 2002–03. Mughal (Citation2007) also used an IOM survey, but this time it was one targeting only 712 households in Khatlon Province that was performed in 2005. Brown et al. (Citation2008) relied on a survey with a sample of 3300 households conducted in 2007 by the ADB. The IOM also carried out a survey of 500 households in 2008, and Khakimov and Mahmadbekov (Citation2009) based their study on this. 11. See Living Standards Measurement Survey on the World Bank website: http://iresearch.worldbank. org/lsms/lsmssurveyFinder.htm for more details. 12. See such documents as Basic Information Document: Tajikistan Living Standards Measurement Survey 2007, July 2008 and Tajikistan Living Standards Survey 2009: Notes for Users, May 2010, for more details about the TLSS. Both these documents can be downloaded from the website mentioned in Note 11. 13. The surveys before 2003 (TLSS2003) do not provide various types of information, e.g. income earned abroad, remittances from members of the household living abroad, names of the overseas cities where family members lived/are living, whether the family members living abroad have/had work permits, and the type of work they engaged/are engaged in, and so on. 14. In both years, calculated from the original forms returned from TLSS, consumption per household was a lot higher than income (in TLSS2007 consumption was 63.0% higher and in TLSS2009 47.7% higher), and this trend was especially apparent for high-income groups. Although it is possible that information on income was inadequately gathered, this pattern was seen in both years so the overall trend is unchanged. We will therefore proceed under the assumption that information on consumption was inadequately gathered from all households. 15. See World Development Indicators 2009, World Bank. 16. The increase in the percentage was significant at the 1% level. Tajikistan is an Islamic country, and some research has emphasised the weak position of women and their lack of freedom. Examples of such studies are Mal'tseva (Citation2007) and Glenn (Citation2009), the latter of which was a social science study. However, it is unclear whether such observations are really accurate. On 18 August 2010 Mr Sanginov, the first deputy minister at the Republic of Tajikistan's Ministry of Labour and Social Security, speaking to the author at his office, said that while the Russian police treated Tajik men extremely harshly, they were kinder to women, and that this had resulted in women moving to Russia to work more frequently. He also told the author that while work in places like restaurants was available all year round, work typically done by men such as street cleaning and construction could only be performed at certain times of the year in Russia. 17. The TLSS for both years used the expression ‘recently’ to ask respondents about travel to foreign countries in that year or that month. This means that even if, for example, someone had spent several months working abroad in 2008, come home and then gone abroad again in 2009, only the most recent stay would be recorded. As a result, the more people with experience of overseas migration in recent years, the smaller the figures of migration in preceding years will be compared with the actual figures. 18. Note that while TLSS2007 includes detailed data on land, livestock and agriculture-related assets, TLSS2009 does not. Data on assets were therefore not employed. However, with regard to 40 types of consumer durable, including cars, motorcycles, trucks, computers, air conditioners and refrigerators, both TLSS2007 and TLS2009 asked respondents whether they owned such items as well as the subjective question of how much they thought they could sell them for if they were to sell them now. These estimates are usable, so the author compiled them and attempted to use them in preliminary analysis. However, the estimation did not yield a significant coefficient. 19. Even when the explanatory variable was set to the 2007 value for each household, the explained variable was set to the amount of remittances received by each household in 2009 (or whether the household had supplied migrants in 2009) and a cross-sectional analysis used panel data for households for the two years, the results were qualitatively the same as those in Table 7 and Table 8. In analysing the determinants of the amount of monthly foreign remittances received by households, the author also introduced individual characteristics of migrants along with all the household factors used here. The individual characteristics used were (1) the gender of the migrant, (2) the age of the migrant, (3) the education level of the migrant and (4) the monthly salary earned in the foreign location by the migrant. However, only monthly salary was significant. If the endogeneity described in this study exists, education level can be expected to show a significant positive coefficient. 20. The author also introduced eight dummy variables for the rural and urban regions within the four provinces comprising Tajikistan, but did not obtain any clear results. The same was true for preliminary analysis on whether migrants are supplied. 21. National Bank of Tajikistan Website, Macro Economic Indicators, http://nbt.tj/files/docs/statistics/macro_en.xls, accessed 28, December 2010. However, according to United Nations Statistics Division http:// unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/Introduction. asp accessed 18, January 2011, while household consumption and overseas remittances declined by around 10% between 2008 and 2009, gross national income (GNI) increased. These findings are not inconsistent with those of this study (Table 6), which found, using household survey data from 2009, that income increased and remittances declined compared with the same survey conducted in 2007. 22. Previous research has noted that since the early 2000s Tajik migration has been on an upward trend, and increasingly concentrated in Russia. The contention of Danzer and Ivaschenko (Citation2010) that the increase in migration, the growing concentration of migrants in Russia, and the rise in the proportion of female migrants represent a response by households to the financial crisis of 2008 would therefore seem to be an overstatement. 23. As already stated in Note 21, the author carried out a preliminary analysis using individual characteristics of migrants but it did not yield any results worthy of note. 24. RIA Novosti, 27 January 2010.