Midis de la recherche

Stefanija Veljanoska (UCL),
Giuseppe Maggio (FAO, University of Sussex)
Agricultural policy and migration in Malawi

The increasing trends in international and internal migration, as well as population pressure, are serious challenges and require adequate development policy responses from the governments of Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we study the migration implications of the Farm Input Subsidy Program in Malawi, a public assistance program that consists in subsidizing fertilizer and improved seeds for maize, the main staple crop. We use national representative panel household data combined with geo-referenced climate data to address this question. We consider heterogeneities of households in terms of credit and liquidity facilities and exposure to different weather conditions to account for non-linear effects and analyze migration outcomes of fertilizer subsidies. Since fertilizer subsidies have not been randomly allocated, the identification strategy relies on an instrumental variable approach where the ethnicity of the household is used to predict its likelihood of being targeted with FISP. Our preliminary results show that receiving FISP reduces the probability of households to migrate.