Data and Code for: Poverty and Migration in the Digital Age: Experimental Evidence on Mobile Banking in Bangladesh

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Jean N. Lee, Millennium Challenge Corporation; Jonathan Morduch, New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; Saravana Ravindran, University of California Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs; Abu S. Shonchoy, Florida International University and IDE-JETRO; Hassan Zaman, World Bank

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Project Description

Summary: Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology can reduce inequality by modernizing traditional ways to transfer money. One year later, for active mobile banking users, urban-to-rural remittances increased by 26% of the baseline mean. Rural consumption increased by 7.5% and extreme poverty fell. Rural households borrowed less, saved more, sent additional migrants, and consumed more in the lean season. Urban migrants experienced less poverty and saved more, but bore costs, reporting worse health.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Mobile Banking; Poverty; Migration; Bangladesh

JEL Classification:
      I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
      O16 Economic Development: Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance
      O33 Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
      R23 Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics

Geographic Coverage: Bangladesh

Universe: Participants were recruited between September 2014 and February 2015. To recruit participants, we took advantage of a pre-existing sampling frame from SHIREE, a garment worker training program run by the nongovernmental organization Gana Unnayan Kendra (GUK) with funding from the United Kingdom Department for International Development. GUK's criteria for targeting "ultra-poor" households included: (1) no ownership of cultivable land, (2) having to skip a meal during the lean season, (3) no financial/microfinance access, (4) residence in an environmentally fragile area, (5) household consumption under 2000 Tk per month (roughly $25 per month at the nominal exchange rate), and (6) productive asset ownership valued no more than 8000 Tk (roughly $100). We restricted the sample to households in Gaibandha with workers in Dhaka. This yielded 341 household and migrant pairs. Beginning from this roster, we then snowball-sampled additional Gaibandha households with migrant members in Dhaka to reach a final sample size of 815 migrant-household pairs. The snowball sample was recruited by asking households in the rural SHIREE sample to suggest households that were similar to them in two dimensions: (1) having a household member that had migrated to Dhaka for work, and (2) that were also poor. These households were then contacted and asked to participate in the study.

Data Type(s): administrative records data; survey data

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Published Versions

V1 [2020-12-15]

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