Gender Differentials in Motives, and Incentives for Migration, Peru 1997: The Role of Wages, Employment, Marriage, Networks, and Relative Deprivation

Vajeera S. Dorabawila, Department of Homeless Services, City of New York

The traditional view in the literature has been that female migration is primarily motivated by marriage while male migration by income factors. This paper explored the extent to which marriage probabilities, own wage, spouse’s economic prospects, employment probabilities, migrant networks and relative welfare are important incentives in migration decisions. Data for this paper primarily comes from the Peru Living Standards and Measurement Surveys 1997. The main estimation technique is multinomial logits. I compared actual reasons for migration, for those that migrated, with projected incentives for migration to determine the extent to which incentives are predictors of actual decisions of individuals. Results indicate that incentives for migration projected using few key observed factors are good indicators of actual reasons for migration among migrants. There are clear interesting gender differences in these migration incentives.