The Impact of Migration on Elderly in Bangladesh

Kuhn, Randall

Abstract

The proposed research studies access to personal support and care among older people in Bangladesh, a society undergoing rapid transitions, aging, and mobility. Descriptive and statistical analyses study receipt of informal personal support from the children of respondents (50+) living in Matlab, a major rural sending region for both urban and international migrants. The research seeks to understand processes of selectivity, strategy, and substitution that facilitate continued support in a period of rapid transition. The guiding hypotheses suggest that while respondents effectively mobilize underutilized sources of support to ensure security even as they pursue aggressive child investment strategies, much of that current success depends on higher fertility, lower mortality, and lower morbidity than should be anticipated in the future. The analysis employs a hierarchy of support to structure an analysis of serial and strategic mobilization of support using data from the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), a 1996 NIA-funded household survey. An exploratory analysis creates measures of elderly access to local support along a range of proximities (same household, same compound, same village) and levels of the support hierarchy (sons, daughters-in-law, daughters). Statistical models predict the retention of support from members of a specific level of the hierarchy as a function of 1) alternate sources of support within the same level; 2) alternate sources of support in other levels; and 3) a respondent's own resources, needs and transfer income. Although the support hierarchy does not structure statistical models, a major hypothesis asserts that the availability of more preferred sources of support (sons, daughters-in-law) will structure the mobilization of less preferred sources (daughters) far more than the reverse effect. The results of this project contribute to a larger program of research on the impact of social networks, migration, and human capital investment on elderly health, elderly well-being, economic development, and continued demographic transition in Bangladesh. Future longitudinal analyses and panel data collection will use the lessons of this project, combined with similar research on elderly financial support, to address potential sources of selectivity and causation in social health research.