In this seminar, Rajan Panta will discuss the purpose and scope of his thesis in the context of an overview of trends and patterns of international labour migration and a survey of the related literature, and to present the preliminary results from one of the core chapters which deals with the impact of remittances on the expenditure patterns of households in Nepal.

The impact of remittances on expenditure patterns are examined by estimating expenditure share functions for four major expenditure categories: food, education, clothing and ‘others’ using data from the Nepal Migration Survey 2009. The expenditure functions are estimated using the Heckman two-step method which correct for the possible sample selection and endogeneity biases. In contrast to other findings in the literature, Rajan Panta finds that remittances induces behavioural changes in household expenditure patterns and the migrant household spent more on food and less on education compared to non-migrant households.