From migrant social capital to community development: A relational account of migration, remittances and inequality

This dissertation explores the causes and consequences of rural-urban migration and remittance flows in 22 Thai communities from 1984 to 2000. The study begins by investigating how social capital influences migration, and proposes a framework that decomposes social capital into resources (information about or assistance with migration), sources (prior migrants), and recipients (potential migrants). The results show that the probability of urban migration increases with the amount of available resources, yet the magnitude of increase depends on the diversity and accessibility of resources as well as recipients' characteristics and the strength of their ties to the sources. The subsequent chapter explicates how the level and distribution of social capital resources in a community change the socio-economic and demographic dynamics of migration over time. I find that migration becomes a less-selective process as migration experience accumulates, and migrants become increasingly diverse in terms of sex, education and wealth. However, the selectivity of migration persists if the distribution of migration experience is not uniform among individuals. Shifting the focus to remittance flows in the second part of the dissertation, I model migration and remittance behavior as interrelated events, and correct for the selection bias in prior work. Once selection is accounted for, I find that the support for migrants' altruism and risk-diversifying strategies as explanations for remittances become stronger, the evidence for migrants' inheritance or investment seeking behavior weakens. Finally, I evaluate how migration-remittance flows alter the level and distribution of household assets in sending communities. Observing the changes in household assets over time, I find that households' migration-remittance choices have a significant effect on the level and nature of their subsequent investments, and this effect depends strongly on households' initial wealth. While rich households face a decrease in assets due to migration of their members, poor households gain assets, and improve their relative status within their communities. The overall effect of migration-remittance flows in the Thai villages is an increase in the level of assets, and decrease in the inequality of their distribution.