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This paper aims to explore the determinants of the livelihoods of return migrant workers in Vietnam. The findings will help authorities updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

The sample is collected when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Vietnamese economy severely. The author considers six issues of income and employment, including total income, stable income, financial pressure experiences, unemployment, stable job and time to find a job. For this purpose, through a pre-structured questionnaire, the primary data is collected from 258 Vietnamese return migrant workers in various foreign countries. Notably, all respondents in the sample are documented but low-skilled return migrant workers. The author uses various empirical regression analyses to conclude that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The author finds that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The findings are critical for Vietnamese authorities in finalizing and updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to exploit the drivers of the livelihoods of return migrants in Vietnam, a rich, two-wave panel survey of respondents in Vietnam aimed at characterizing the history of migration of low-skilled and documented migrants back to Vietnam and to use these histories to gain insight into Vietnamese return migrants’ economic status, access to financial, welfare and health insurance benefits and employment prospects.

The purpose of this paper is twofold, namely, to investigate if living and working abroad influences the (subjective) health of return migrants and to understand if there are any spillovers of return-migrant members onto health conditions of the family members left behind.

To that end, this paper uses the DoTM (Development on the Move) Migration Survey 2009, as well a propensity score matching to address selectivity on observables and IV (instrumental variables) for the selectivity on unobservables.

Results suggest that when equalized on observables, return migrants have better health than non-migrants. However, the reverse causality channel (less healthy individuals are more inclined to return) works to attenuate the true effect of return migration on health. Results further suggest a positive spillover effect of return migration on the health of the family members left behind, being mainly driven by the work of remittances sent while abroad, and not by the returned wealth or by the health knowledge transfer.

This paper offers at least two novelty lines to contribute to the current sparse of knowledge. First, it is among the scarce papers, and probably the only quantitative one, to investigate the nexus between return migration and health outcomes. Second, it heavily dwells on the role of selectivity (both on observables and unobservables) in determining the true (causal) effect of return migration on health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative employment levels of return migrants in Finland with regard to their re‐adaptation into the labour market.

Longitudinal census data distinguished Finns who had lived abroad and returned to Finland. These return migrants are compared with non‐migrants with regard to employment levels, using logistic regression models that account for sex, age, education, mother tongue and place of residence.

Both male and female return migrants have odds of employment that are only about half those of their non‐migrant counterparts. The employment differential is stable over time and, consequently, not particularly sensitive to changes in the macroeconomic environment. Relative employment rates of migrants with short periods abroad and long periods in the home country are somewhat higher than those of other migrants, but still lower than those of non‐migrants. Difficulties in readapting into Finnish society are consequently associated with personal characteristics that cannot be observed explicitly but are apparently associated with job‐finding probability.

Considering that Finland at present has no explicit measures directed towards return migrants, it is suggested that this group should be given more policy attention.

The paper provides quantitative evidence that Finnish migrants have substantial difficulties in finding employment in the home country labour market subsequent to return migration, and that these problems cannot be attributed to structural factors.

This study examines diaspora engagement and return migration programs aimed at providing diaspora youth with an opportunity to obtain higher education in Estonia and Kazakhstan. In particular, the authors sought to identify the main motivations, benefits and challenges of the programs, as well as understand how the programs contribute to the ethnic identity formation of diaspora students.

The paper employed a qualitative multiple-case study research design. In both countries, data were collected by means of 26 semi-structured interviews with return migrant students and experts involved in implementing the programs.

The study findings suggest that the primary motivations for diaspora youth to return to their homelands are tuition-free higher education, financial support and repatriation prospects in both countries. In Estonia, the scholarship holders struggled with language requirements for university admissions, the cost of living insufficiently covered by the monthly stipend and limited integration opportunities. In Kazakhstan, the students had to face the Russian language barrier and socio-cultural marginalization in their everyday life. It was also found that the return migrant students in Estonia and Kazakhstan develop hybrid identities to integrate into their domestic society. They reinforce their ethnic identities and negotiate their diasporic identities to make sense of their own background and cultural heritage and acclimatize to life in the new context.

The study provides practical implications for policy implementers and policymakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan. It can also be useful for the worldwide research community interested in exploring education-oriented diaspora engagement and return migration programs and their influence on the ethnic identity of diaspora students.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the impact of return migration on the occupational choice in rural China.

The authors’ research uses the two‐stage residuals inclusion estimation, 2SRI, to deal with the endogeneity problem, and then compares the occupational choice between returnees and stayers with multinomial logit estimation and counterfactual analysis.

The authors mainly find that: the migration experience has a significant positive impact on wage‐employment activities, but may be has a negative effect on the entrepreneurial activities. The workers engaged in non‐agricultural activities (self‐employment and wage‐employment) have the same characteristics in the labor market (i.e. younger, male, higher education levels, less average land and parents with little children) compared to the agricultural activities, but these characteristics show no significant affect on the occupation choice between self‐employment and wage‐employment.

This paper extends the empirical analysis in internal migration, but it also has some drawbacks, such as not enough data can be obtained to distinguish the occupations between different types of self‐employment as own account workers and as entrepreneurs. Further research needs more comprehensive data to support.

The authors’ research is the first study which uses self‐selection model to examine the activity choice of return migrants in rural China. They also extend the existing studies in two directions: first, they use nationally‐representative data from the general social survey of China carried out in 2006 to examine the relationship between the return rural migrants and their occupational choices. Second, they propose a more exact category for rural occupational choice including non‐agricultural activities (self‐employee, wage‐employment) and agricultural activities (peasants).

While there is evidence that return migration promotes entrepreneurship and self-employment of those who migrated, previous studies have not focused on whether migration provides the same benefits to individuals who did not migrate. Using a unique dataset that provides information on both current and return migrants in rural China (RUMiC), we investigate the impact of migration on entrepreneurship among individuals with no migration experience. We explore the self-employment choices of individuals who live in households with return migrants and individuals who live in households that have migrants currently in the city, comparing them with individuals living in non-migrant households. Our methodology allows us to control for the potential endogeneity between the migration and self-employment decisions. The results show that return migration promotes self-employment among household members who have not migrated. However, left-behind individuals are less likely to be self-employed when compared with those living in non-migrant households.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of temporary migration on the upward occupational mobility by using a novel database from Estonia.

The authors use a unique data set of the online job search portal of Estonia that includes thousands of employees with foreign work experience. The authors study whether the presence of temporary migration in ones working career is associated with upward movement in the occupational ladder, defined either in terms of wages or required human capital.

The authors did not find any positive effect of temporary migration on upward occupational mobility and in case of females the effect was negative. The results could be related to the short-term nature of migration and the occupational downshifting abroad as well as the functioning of home country labour market.

While the uniqueness of the data set is of value, one needs to acknowledge its weaknesses: the job-seekers work histories are self-reported and the authors do not know what information was left out as undesired by applicant.

The findings imply that the benefits of temporary migration from Eastern to Western Europe on the sending country via the returnees’ labour market performance might be limited, yet it does not exclude the benefits of return migration through other mechanism.

The literature on return migration is not big and there are only a few papers dealing with occupational change or mobility of the return migrants. Compared to earlier studies we have looked at wider set of occupations ranked by different ladders. Using the unique data set the authors have included in the study ca 7,500 return migrants while earlier studies have been based on rather small samples.

Many countries have experienced, or are experiencing, urbanization. One such example is China. Even though the large‐scale rural‐urban migration seems chaotic on the surface, there are certain underlying forces driving individual decisions. The purpose of this paper is to provide some understanding of the relationship between human capital, migration, and occupational choices.

The paper starts with an overlapping generations model. Human capital plays various roles across different occupations – it does not affect the income of farmers, it affects income of workers linearly, and it has increasing returns in rural non‐farm business. The paper then derives income profiles for individuals with heterogeneous human capital, and finds the human capital thresholds of occupations. The paper calibrates the model to China, and simulates the model to answer two questions: how does an improving human capital distribution affect rural wages, quantities of migrants and return migrants? How does a fast‐growing urban wage rate affect rural wages, quantities of migrants and return migrants?

First, depending on the initial human capital level, policies aiming to enhance human capital may have different impacts on migration. If the initial human capital level is low, these policies will yield more permanent migrants; on the contrary, if the initial human capital is at a relatively high level, then a shrinking permanent migrant class with a growing entrepreneur class can be expected. This results in an inverted U‐shaped relation between the initial human capital level and the size of the permanent migrant class. Second, even though the non‐farm business of return migrants helps raise rural wages, the income inequality between rural and urban areas is not eliminated and migration is persistent. Third, borrowing constraints limit the size of rural non‐farm businesses and slow down the development of rural industry. The fourth and final point is that, migration costs discourage labor mobility and reduce the quantities of both permanent migrants and entrepreneurs.

This is an original paper on this subject.

Community solidarity with return migrants is commonly observed in the rural areas of developing countries. In this paper, we briefly review the evidence from sociological studies on this issue and suggest a new economic approach to such solidarity. We show that an implicit institutional arrangement, whereby migrants have no obligations (e.g., no obligation to remit) but may nevertheless enjoy equal ownership rights on collective resources upon return, enhances economic efficiency via an optimal regulation of migration flows. We also address enforceability issues since, within each generation, time consistency problems may give rise to opportunistic behavior among non-migrants.

This chapter addresses the following questions: To what extent do the socio-economic characteristics of circular/repeat migrants differ from the migrants who return permanently to the home country after their first trip (i.e. return migrants)? And, what determines each of these distinctive temporary migration forms? Using Albanian household survey data and both a multinomial logit model and a maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) probit with two sequential selection equations, we find that education, gender, age, geographical location and the return reasons from the first migration trip significantly affect the choice of migration form. Compared to return migrants, circular migrants are more likely to be male, have primary education and originate from rural, less developed areas. Moreover, return migration seems to be determined by family reasons, a failed migration attempt but also by the fulfilment of a savings target.