 I am from Myanmar and we have a huge phenomenon with migration. In 2014, when our government made the first national census, which we haven't done for nearly 30 years, we thought that we have 60 million population, but when the actual census is done, we found that we only have 52 million population. We didn't have a chance to count some 6 to 7 million Burmese who are living in Southeast Asia, mainly in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and many other parts of our neighbouring economies. And then also, we didn't also count the Rohingya, the Muslim minorities in the western part of the country, which in the recent weeks, our country was caught in the international headlines. There was a kind of a false migration that turned, become very ugly and then we were being accused of having genocide against the Rohingya minorities. My presentation likes to emphasise how developing and transitioning a country like Myanmar is very important to recognise the migration phenomena and it is also very important for the national governments to acquire a kind of a capacity that you could just mention. It's not just the international instruments that try to become more local, but it's the local governments who also need to own it and try to manage the migration and then in order to do that, you need to have the capacity. So I'm trying to advocate how migration is so important for our economy by using the survey that we did in 2015 and 2016 and this is about what we did in southeast part of the country, the Moon State, where many population in that small states actually migrated to Thailand and I'm trying to discuss about the causes and also the consequences of migration in that particular state. Moon State is a small open economy, it's a very vibrant, small ethnic minority state where we also have a fourth largest city in Myanmar. It is very much connected to Thailand, so it's physically, culturally and historically, it is very much tied to Thailand. The state is very much dependent on the agriculture, so the agriculture then was rice and rubber, which tend to be very labor-intensive and then also the state is quite relatively well off compared to many other regions, especially those in the western part of the region where we have the current problems. The survey was conducted in 2015. It took about six months to collect 1,680 households and we also follow up with the qualitative interviews and focus group discussions in the later part of 2015 and 2016 and so we are coming up with some sort of initial evidence. In fact, the whole country, Myanmar, is quite mobile, so there's quite a bit of internal migration and also the outward external migration, but the Moon State is quite significant in a way that it is not only the highest out-migrating region, but also at the same time, the state is also receiving migrants, internal migrants from other parts of the country, so it is a kind of a transit state, which I think is quite relevant to what is happening in the western part of the country where the current Rohingya crisis happened. Rohingya is also a kind of a transit state between Bangladesh and also the more effluent Southeast Asian Muslim countries where the Rohingya refugees eventually try to go and then settle in the countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. The agriculture, right now, the Moon State has highest concentration of rubber plantations in Myanmar. The rubber tends to be also living intensive. You need the tapers to get the rubber to produce and then now most of the tapers and the laborers who are working in the rubber industry is now moving to Thailand where the Thailand has a similar huge rubber industry. In fact, Thailand is the world top exporter of the rubber where most of the plantation workers actually came from Myanmar. The remittances, according to our survey, 20% of the rural household income, especially more upper income families are dependent on the remittances. So the yellow highlighted areas are the share of the remittances in the household expenditures. In Moon State, almost half of the households have at least one migrant. So it becomes a very common household strategy to generate income and the majority, 84% of the international migrants from Moon State actually went to Thailand because of the cultural and religious affinities. Migration tends to increase in 2011, 2011 and 2012, when both the host country and then the sending countries liberalized the laws governing the migration. So for instance, like the Thai laws, for the first time they recognized a Myanmar migrant worker as the legitimate workers. They no longer treat them as the illegal migrants, whereas the Myanmar also recognized a migration phenomenon and we tried to increase and provide protection against these migrant workers. We also found that the richer households are more likely to have migrants because it also reflects the cost of migration. So the cost of migration is still not cheap and so it still can only be afforded by some of the household who can actually invest in the migration process itself. And migrants are mostly young men and women, so age between 16 and 35 constitute about 75% of the migrant and then 45% of migrants are female. It's about the migrants who are going to Thailand so we are seeing both men and women actually migrating in a very highly increasing phenomenon in that part of the country. And this is the missing labor force and then you can see the population pyramid being damp. There's a dip in the very important working age between 15 to 39. And when we also try to look at the wages along the moon state and then the left part of the graph is the cities which are farthest away from the Thai Myanmar border and then those cities in the right side is the one who are actually located in the border area. So then you can see the wages of the laborers. The day agriculture laborers actually tend to increase when the location becomes closer to the Thailand. We have quite a huge range of development implications that I would like to focus first on the agriculture, we have an inefficient land rental sales market so the land use has become less efficient when the farming communities have a high migration. And then we also have a transit migrant workers from the central other parts of the country who are trying to work in the agriculture land in moon state and then that also produces a lot of inefficient production. And so what happens is the farmers, the resident farmers in moon state tend to focus more on the low labor intensity crops like fruits and less intensive technologies instead of using the labor to make sure that there's proper farming techniques that they try to use a low intensity technology. And then there's also the farming families are also facing the rising wages of farm laborers and then it also turned to higher costs of production and then also higher costs of skilled labor in case of rubber. And the impacts on the families is also quite negative because the majority of migrants have education under high school and the youth and adult are the highest categories of migrants so the high levels of families with children living with seniors like their grandparents are also facing a very vicious cycle of low education, early dropouts and dependency on the migration resources. The impact of remittances in according to our survey most of the remittances funds by the dependent families are used mostly about the house construction and some of those capital investment. They don't necessarily reinvest in the agriculture or invest in other productive businesses and that's where the usefulness of the remittances in terms of resolving the dependent situations of the families not being met. So essentially what the government has been quite unprepared or ill-prepared to take the challenge of migration which has becoming an increasing phenomenon in the recent years and so this is where we are advocating the government especially the regional government as well as the national government by the way Myanmar has 14 sub-national governments which is we follow the United States formula of a federal-like arrangement so each sub-national governments have their own parliament they have their own legislature and they have their own government so we also don't find the kind of responsive government in the moon state itself and then the national government itself also having been really being more comprehensive of the migration management capacity so I think this is where we are advocating perhaps they can start with a few initiatives one is to revive the rubber productivity because the moon state has a highest rubber plantations and this is where the government can invest in the provision of the skill training for the tapping so that they can nowadays the woman filling the role of the men's tapers and this is where perhaps the government can take the initiative to train the woman perhaps the woman can become a skilled tapers and then that's how it can also affects the quality of rubber they produce and they can actually get more income from the quality rubber and so this is the one area where a certain government agency can start doing that kind of training one other issue which we are trying to focus on is the microfinance for migrants because as I said the migration is costly and usually the financial problem begins at the beginning of the migration phase when the migrant workers wanted to migrate and then they need to borrow money and this is how they actually unintentionally become the victims of the agents who also control the money so this is where the microfinance organization that have been targeting the poor in many other instances they haven't really gone into the migration services so they haven't really served the migrant population because the migrant populations are moved by and that was assumed as a financial risk and then the microfinance institution haven't really invested a lot in financing the migrant workers on the other hand the migrant workers are the one with more guarantee income but somehow they are not credit worthiness to actually attract the more low cost loan for their migration processes so this is where the government can actually intervene and provide a solution for these migrant workers and then in connection to that we are also focusing a bit on the capacity development for migrant workers whereas the financial literacy is the key because they are actually working in the foreign countries they are not familiar with using some of the banking services because most of those migrant workers are unbanked citizens when they went to Thailand or Malaysia they are actually being given all the ATM cards but I was told that none of them they use ATM card only once a month so when the pay days comes and they usually go to the ATM machine get all the money out and then they keep the money at their home so I think this is a kind of a situation where the government can provide more assistance to some of those migrant workers in terms of financial literacy and financial inclusion strategies so this is my final recommendation to the national government and also as a piece to the international organizations especially the IOM and many other agencies who might be able to help us with the kind of a capacity that we need to conduct some serious research for evidence-based policy making because we are a newly emerging and transitional country which did not recognize migration as a development phenomenon we treated that as a illegal criminal act so we don't necessarily have a kind of a reliable data so we need to this is this survey we can only conduct in a one small region where the migration affected the most but I think we need to have a much more national data so that we can understand the labor mobility issues in the larger national context and then also the skill development relevant for both domestic and overseas markets something like a rubber tapping our government were afraid that if they provide the skills that all the skills were meant to help our neighbors, neighboring economies and then their ability to use that skill efficiently but nevertheless we have to invest in some of those skills training for the migrant workers because nowadays with the normalization of our domestic economy and domestic political environment more and more migrants are thinking about returning back to the country and this is where initial investment in the skills can be recaptured once they all return back to the country and of course the remittances still is a key issue and this is where we can leverage the migration for development purposes and then most important aspect is to channel the remittances into a more productive investments and then also in the programs that can actually address the root causes of the migration in the first place so I'd like to stop here and then I look forward to working with you more in this area, thank you