Migrants' Home Town Associations and Local Development in Mali

• Date: 01 April 2015
• Author: Marion Mercier,Flore Gubert,Sandrine Mesplé‐Somps,Lisa Chauvet
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12100
• Published date: 01 April 2015

Scand. J. of Economics 117(2), 686–722, 2015

DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12100

Migrants’ Home Town Associations and

Local Development in Mali∗

Lisa Chauvet

IRD, UMR DIAL; PSL, Paris-Dauphine University, FR-75010 Paris, France

chauvet@dial.prd.fr

Flore Gubert

IRD, UMR DIAL; PSL, Paris-Dauphine University, FR-75010 Paris, France

gubert@dial.prd.fr

Marion Mercier

Paris School of Economics, FR-75014 Paris, France

mercier@dial.prd.fr

Sandrine Mespl´

e-Somps

IRD, UMR DIAL; PSL, Paris-Dauphine University, FR-75010 Paris, France

mesple@dial.prd.fr

Abstract

We explore the impact of migrants’ Home Town Associations (HTAs) on the provision of

public goods in Mali. We combine an original dataset on all the HTAs created by Malian

migrants in France from 1981 with census data on public goods in all Malian villages since

1976, and we run double-difference estimations to compare villages with and without an

HTA, before and after the creation of the HTAs. We find robust evidence that the provision

of schools, health centers, and, to a lesser extent, water amenities has increased significantly

faster in villages targeted by an HTA between 1987 and 2009 than in control villages.

Keywords: Home Town Associations; Mali; migration; public goods

JEL classification:F22; H41; H75; O55

I. Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest from scholars, development

practitioners, and international organizations in the relationship between

migration and development. In particular, academic research has focused

∗This research has been supported by “FSP Mali contemporain”, Paris municipality, the

French National Research Agency, and the European FP7 (program NOPOOR). We thank

Claire Bernard, Mahamadou Dangnoko, Anda David, and Nelly Rakoto-Tiana for their help

during the data collection, and we are grateful to the Malian statistical office for providing

census data. We also thank the editor and twoanonymous referees for very helpful comments.

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2014.

L. Chauvet et al. 687

strongly on the impact of remittances on origin countries, notably on ag-

gregate development outcomes, such as poverty and growth, and on the

behavior of recipient households. External remittances have become an in-

creasingly substantial source of financial flows for developing countries,

and have outstripped private capital flows and official development aid

in many of them. In 2011, remittances were the second largest source of

external finance to developing countries as a whole (370 billion dollars)

behind foreign direct investment (around 500 billion dollars). They were

nearly three times larger than official development assistance (around 140

billion dollars) (Ratha and Silwal, 2012).

In addition to sending remittances to their family, migrants frequently

contribute to the development of their village of origin by sending collec-

tive transfers through Home Town Associations (HTAs). HTAs are volun-

tary clubs located in immigrants’ host societies, gathering migrants from

the same locality of origin. One of their goals is to fund local develop-

ment projects, and as such they have received increased attention from the

development community, which considers them to be potential participants

in the process of leveraging funds for investment and development in the

resource-poor communities of origin. There are good reasons to be opti-

mistic about the role of HTAs in development. In the context of weak states

with low fiscal capacity, HTAs and collective remittances can complement

scarce public resources and relieve binding budget constraints. Thus, the

population of the locality of origin where HTAs intervene might end up

better off.

Yet, the question of the real impact of HTAs on local development is

not straightforward from a theoretical perspective. First, instead of comple-

menting public resources, collective remittances might actually substitute

for them and crowd out public finance. Indeed, by relaxing important bottle-

necks, they might create a disincentive for the state and local governments

to intervene, which might result in lower public spending (Grabel, 2008).

In other words, the activity of HTAs might allow local governments to ex-

tricate themselves from their responsibilities, leaving the targeted localities

worse off in terms of public goods. Second, HTAs might not be as effective

as public actors in terms of development objectives. Indeed, the impact of

the activity of HTAs depends on how projects are conceived and selected,

and on how transparent and inclusive the decision-making processes are.

When projects are designed by HTA members from abroad, with little or

no input from their potential beneficiaries, they might be ill-conceived,

might not meet the needs of home communities, and thus might be quickly

abandoned. Third, when the migration process is selective and mainly in-

volves certain groups, the HTA projects might serve private agendas rather

than addressing larger community needs. Thus, their benefits might be

narrowly distributed and might aggravate social divides in the community.

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2014.

688 Migrants’ HTAs and local development in Mali

In this scenario, HTAs might contribute to the erosion of social cohesion

within local communities, thereby altering their capacity to agree upon and

implement collective action, which ultimately has detrimental effects on

sustained local development.

In the case of Mali, a few small-scale case studies focusing on the

Kayes area, in the western part of the country, describe migrants’ HTAs

as a substantial source of funding, and document the number and type

of development projects they have financed.1However, the contribution

of HTAs at the national level has never been systematically investigated,

and there is no quantitative evidence as to whether their activity makes

the villages of origin better off in terms of local public goods than those

villages with no HTA.

This lack of evidence on the net impact of HTAs on local development is

not restricted to Mali, and the literature provides very little quantitative evi-

dence on collective remittances. Two major exceptions are Beauchemin and

Schoumaker (2009) on Burkina Faso and Kijima and Gonzalez-Ramirez

(2012) on the Mexican Tres por Uno (3×1) program. In the Burkina

Faso case study, Beauchemin and Schoumaker exploit retrospective data

covering the 1960–2002 period on a sample of 600 settlements, and use

event-history models to test whether the existence of a migrant associa-

tion2has an influence on the provision of public services, on agricultural

modernization, and on the availability of infrastructures. They find a pos-

itive and significant effect of HTAs on the provision of social services

and roads, with some differences in magnitude from one decade to the

other. Kijima and Gonzalez-Ramirez (2012) document the Mexican (3 ×1)

program, which supports HTA involvement in the development of origin

communities by providing complementary funding through municipal, state,

and federal contributions. Focusing on two states of Mexico (i.e., Jalisco

and Zacatecas3), the authors observe that recipient communities became

better off between 2000 and 2005, as attested by decreasing scores of de-

privation. In this particular case, it is argued that roads, water supply, and

non-agricultural productive projects funded by the (3 ×1) program have

improved community welfare.

1The pioneering research on this topic was carried out in the 1990s (e.g., Quiminal, 1991;

Daum, 1998). Gauvrit and Le Bahers (2004) have provided an inventory of development

projects financed by HTAs in 51 Malian localities in the Kayes region, whereas Charef and

Gonin (2005) have undertaken several case studies at the locality level, all of them in the

Kayes region.

2Contrary to other West African countries such as Mali, most HTAs in Burkina Faso have

been created by internal migrants.

3Those two states have been chosen because they have received the higher amounts of the

budget of the program.

CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2014.