 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on theories of international migration. Today I will talk about the new economics of labour migration, which became famous at the end of the 80s for explaining why people move particularly out of developing regions and countries. Now what the new economics of labour migration did differently theoretically compared to earlier theories like the neoclassical theory, push-pull theory or behaviouralist approaches is to shift the focus away from individuals making a decision to move away, to move internationally towards households as collective units that decide together to send somebody abroad because of a family inversion, namely to make sure that people or families can cope with certain risks that life brings in developing regions in particular, where the welfare state is not so developed that whenever anything happens they can get support from the state for example. And so what Audet Stark particularly, who is one of the main founding fathers of new economics of labour migration, indicated is that people in developing countries do not have insurance against many risks. Think about hurricanes that can happen, think about droughts. So many things can happen that destroy your crops, which means that when that happens, if that is your only source of income, you're in trouble, you really cannot survive. So what happens is that people try to spread the risks that they have and anticipate on any eventual natural disasters that might already happen and they use migration to do so. Because by sending somebody abroad from your family, you are sure that you get some extra money in, in any case when anything happens, that you have an alternative income. So you see income diversification happening and you have a spread of risk by the different families. Now key to understand the new economics of labour migration and why people then make a decision to move internationally is the concept of relative deprivation, which is a concept that Audet Stark took from sociology. And I leave you just for a minute to read a quote on the slide, which explains what relative deprivation is about. So I hope you now had enough time to read the quote that I introduced on the slide, but we will explain this also a little bit further later on. So the idea is that it is rather relative deprivation instead of absolute poverty that really drives people to migrate. And this is something that we really also see when you look at the graph here, for example, namely that people who live in regions where there is a very low economic development, where there's a lot of poverty, which are really on the left hand side of this bar graph, you see that the tendency to emigrate is rather low compared to people who live in middle income countries because they have more money available to migrate. And that is where the concept of relative deprivation really kicks in, where people start to compare themselves with others. So there was this sociologist who was called Walter Runkeman, an historical sociologist who set us four preconditions for relative deprivation to occur. And this will really help you to explain the core of the concept. So person A does not have X. What does that mean? That this is your car, right? And I also have the very same car. So this is parked, we live next to each other, you are my neighbor, and we both have this car parked in front of our house. So we both have the same, there's nothing to complain about. But then suddenly you see that I park in Austin Martin one day in front of my car. You think, wow, this is a very nice car. Where does that come from? And you ask me, like, how did you get that car? And I say, well, you know, I have some family members that I did send abroad. They sent me remittances that allowed me to save some money and that allowed me also to buy that car. But that means that you can feel relatively deprived because I do have something that you do not have. And that is then the second precondition, right? So you know that I have a car, you want to have that car as well. So you feel relatively deprived because you also want an Austin Martin. And then, of course, you also know that obtaining this is realistic because you know that I did send some family members abroad who sent me money, remittances, which allowed me to buy that car. And then you think like, OK, so I will do the same. We also send the family member abroad. And that is how relative deprivation. It's not about comparing yourself to the whole of society. No, it's comparing yourself to people who are next to you, who you know. And you see that through migration, their status changes. That is what leads you as a family also to think about migration as an option to diversify your income, to increase your income, and also maybe to improve your status in the region where you are living. And another example that we can give here comes from Chitwun Valley, where Bandari did a very interesting study. And Chitwun Valley is a valley in Nepal, which was called for a very long time the Valley of the Blackwater because there was a lot of malaria. It was very bad living there. But then there was a malaria eradication program in the 50s, which led to a massive increase in the population of Chitwun Valley, namely from around 40,000 inhabitants to about 350,000 inhabitants 40 years later. But important here is that in the community, the villages that are located in Chitwun Valley, your status is based on the number of acres that you have, they call it kata, of land, agricultural land. And the more agricultural land that you have, the more status that you have in the community. And so it's a very good case study because you have 80% of the people living there who really work in agriculture. You have 23.9%, so 24% of households that actually do send individuals away to find work. And then Bandari wondered about, okay, why was that really the case? What drove their migration decision? And then she started to map how much kata and how much acres do each family possess in the valley. And then she started to look at what is the likelihood that then families sent somebody abroad. And as you can see on the graph here on my right hand side, is that those who have a lot of land, which are the upper bars, that they are much less likely because the bar is to the left, they're far less likely to send away people abroad to find work, whereas those who are in the lower bars and who have few land are much more likely to send people abroad because with more money, you can also acquire more land. So here is the principle again of relative deprivation. You look around you, you see there's people with more land, people with more land have more power. I also want to have that, so we send people abroad, and that's how the migration process, decision-making process, starts to work according to the new economics of labor migration. So this was the knowledge clip on the new economics of labor migration. I hope you enjoyed it.