Marion Richard (Paris School of Economics, UCLouvain)

An Indirect Cost of Conflict: Insecurity as a Barrier to Migration Flows in Mali

Marion Richard
Paris School of Economics, UCLouvain

Abstract

The central Sahel region has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of violent events in the past ten years. This study aims to examine how insecurity along main migration routes affects households’ ability of households to rely on migration as a risk-coping and income-smoothing strategy. Exploiting detailed data on the origin of remittances received from a set of 12 destinations in neighboring countries and regions of Mali, I construct a dyadic panel dataset of bilateral migration and remittances flows to estimate a pseudo-gravity model of migration decisions including conflicts on a given migration corridor as an additional bilateral migration costs. Controlling for a rich structure of fixed effect including origin-year and destination-year fixed effects, I find evidence that conflicts located within 2km of the shortest route between a locality and a potential destination have large effect on the probability that a household will report migrants or receiving remittances from this destination, with an estimated elasticity of migration to road conflict about half as important as the distance elasticity. These effects are significantly larger for localities which experienced droughts in the past growing season, suggesting that road insecurity reduces migration responses to climatic shocks.

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