Food insecurity in Ethiopia is a persistent development challenge. In this paper, we investigate the effects of rural outmigration on indicators of household food security in Ethiopia. The empirical data come from a two-year panel data collected from three regions of the country. To control for the potential endogeneity of migration and migration selection bias, our estimation uses a combination of a difference-in-difference (DID) model and an inverse-probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) approach (IPTW-DID). We find that, on average, rural outmigration has significantly improved the amount of daily calories consumed per adult equivalent by around 22%. Our estimation results also show that outmigration has significantly reduced food poverty gap and severity of food poverty by seven and four percentage points, respectively.

Authors: Abebaw, D.; Admassie, A.; Kassa, H.; Padoch, C.

Subjects: migration, rural communities, households, food security

Publication type: ISI, Journal Article, Publication

Year: 2020

ISSN: 0305-750X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104879