Halahingano Rohorua

How Pro-Poor is the Selection of Seasonal Migrant Workers from Tonga Under New Zealand's Recognized Seasonal Employer Program?

Temporary migration programs for unskilled workers are increasingly being proposed as a way to both relieve labor shortages in developed countries and aid development in sending countries without entailing many of the costs associated with permanent migration. New Zealands new Recognized Seasonal Employer program is designed to enable unskilled workers from the Pacific Islands to work in horticulture and viticulture in New Zealand for a period of up to seven months. However, the development impact on a sending country will depend not only on how many workers participate, but also on who participates. This paper uses new survey data from Tonga to examine the process of selecting workers for the Recognized Seasonal Employer program, and to analyze how pro-poor the recruitment process has been to date. The findings show that recruited workers come from largely agricultural backgrounds, and have lower average incomes and schooling levels than Tongans not participating in the program. Comparing the characteristics of program workers with those of Tongans applying to permanently migrate to New Zealand through the Pacific Access Category, the program workers are more rural and less educated. The program therefore seems to have succeeded in creating new opportunities for relatively poor and unskilled Tongans to work in New Zealand.

Natural Experiment Evidence on the Effect of Migration on Blood Pressure and Hypertension

Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where wages are higher. But, the effect of this migration on other dimensions of well-being such as health are less clear and existing evidence is ambiguous because of potential for self-selection bias. In this paper, we use a natural experiment, comparing successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery to experimentally estimate the impact of migration on measured blood pressure and hypertension. Hypertension is a leading global health problem, as well as being an important health measure that responds quickly to migration. We use various econometric estimators to form bounds on the treatment effects because there appears to be selective non-compliance in the natural experiment. Even with these bounds, the results suggest significant and persistent increases in blood pressure and hypertension, which are likely to have implications for future health budgets given recent increases in developing to developed country migration.

Development Impacts of Seasonal and Temporary Migration: A Review of Evidence from the Pacific and Southeast Asia

Seasonal and temporary migration programs are widely used around the world, yet there is scant evidence as to their development impacts. Absent such evidence, it is difficult to evaluate whether the proliferation of temporary worker programs in recent years is a useful development. This article reviews studies that attempt to measure impacts of seasonal and temporary migration with a particular focus on evidence from the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Information Flows and Migration: Recent Survey Evidence from the South Pacific

Standard models of the migration decision-making assume potential migrants are well informed of the employment opportunities available in different labor markets, and decide whether or not to migrate on this basis. This paper uses new survey data collected in Tonga and Vanuatu to assess the information migrants and potential migrants have about employment opportunities available through the new Recognized Seasonal Employer program, and the means of communication used to acquire this information. We also employ additional surveys of Tongans and Tongan emigrants to measure the extent to which knowledge acts as a constraint to migration through the Pacific Access Category, and to examine whether even very highly skilled emigrants know whether or not they can collect pension income earned abroad if they return to Tonga. The data reveal significant gaps in information about employment opportunities abroad, despite a large emigrant network and quite high levels of communication between New Zealand and these Pacific Islands.

Estimating the willingness to pay for Warmer and Drier Homes

ABSTRACT New Zealand is one of several countries to use subsidies for retrofitting insulation and installing improved heating devices such as heat pumps. The valuation of these devices by the affected populations remains unknown. We investigate willingness to pay for such devices, using a choice experiment with a sample of Pacific Islanders in the upper North Island. This is a high-risk group for respiratory disease, who typically rent crowded and inadequately heated dwellings. Using both conditional logit and panel mixed logit models, we find reasonably precise estimates of the willingness to pay for four improved heating and humidity control devices, which would cover the capital costs of two of the devices, and about three-quarters of the cost of the other two devices.