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In developing countries, such as India, the seasonal nature of agriculture becomes a primary cause of economic distress. In response, households engage in migration as a coping mechanism to diversify the risk as well as for maximising household income during agricultural slack season. Thus, households collectively decide to send one or more members away with the assurance that the migrant will send a part of their urban income, enabling the household to improve living standards through increased consumption expenditures. In this light, this study focuses on seasonal out-migration from the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa in India. Using the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics East-India panel data set for 2011–2014, the study attempts to analyse the determinants of intensity of migration for the panel data. Second, we try to evaluate the impact of migration on the consumption expenditure of left-behind households using inverse probability-weighted regression. The analysis of the determinants of migration suggests the presence of distress migration where external shocks in the form of climate change-related losses increase the migration intensity of the households, highlighting migration as a coping mechanism. The second part of the study reveals higher per-capita food as well as non-food expenditure for the migrant households as compared to the non-migrants based on the yearly cross-section analysis. These findings suggest the positive effects of seasonal migration on left-behind families.
Basoya et al. (Tue,) studied this question.