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By examining migration within and from Indonesia, this new IMI / DEMIG working paper studies the impact of social policies on internal and international migration.

In this paper, author Edo Mahendra analyses the impact of Indonesia’s 2005 Unconditional Cash Transfers Scheme on households’ migration decisions. He uniquely combines internal and international migration in an integrated empirical analysis using household-level data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey and the district-level data of education and health infrastructure for the empirical analysis.

The paper highlights the complex links between social policies and migration. The analyses finds that unconditional cash transfers increase internal migration but have no effect on international migration, particularly among poor households. The paper also finds that better education and health facilities are associated to lower international migration.