Louis Boakye-Yiadom is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Ghana. He holds a PhD (Economics) from the University of Bath, and he has special research interest in the following areas: gender analysis, the economics of education, migration and remittances, poverty, wellbeing, and inequality. Most of Louis’ research activities have focused on the micro-econometric analysis of household livelihood strategies. He is particularly interested in the empirical analysis of the welfare impacts of livelihood strategies and social interventions in developing countries. His teaching has focused on development economics, especially at the graduate level. For his MIASA Fellowship, Louis Boakye-Yiadom is using survey data and quantitative techniques to analyse the importance and determinants of the various forms of internal migration in Ghana. The study further explores the gender and labour market dimensions of internal migration in Ghana.
MIASA Project: Internal Migration in Ghana: An Analysis of the Determinants and Unexplored Dimensions
The prevalence of migration as a livelihood strategy has long been recognized in the academic and public spheres. While the importance of both internal and international migration has been widely documented, international migration has somewhat attracted more attention in recent years, plausibly owing to the role of international migrant remittances in the development efforts of many developing countries. Discussions on internal migration, on the other hand, have often focussed on concerns about a perceived increase in rural-urban migration, with relatively little attention given to other forms of internal migration.
The proposed study seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of internal migration in Ghana, and to highlight various dimensions of the four main forms of this phenomenon, namely, urban-urban, urban-rural, rural-urban, and rural-rural migration forms. Using data from mainly the 2016/2017 Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS7), the study will employ descriptive statistics and econometric modelling to analyse the importance and determinants of the various forms of internal migration in Ghana. The study would further explore the gender and labour market dimensions of internal migration, as well as the relationships between migrant-headed households and remittance flows. The study would also give special attention to urban-rural migration, a phenomenon that has hardly been explored comprehensively for Ghana.
