Migration, remittances and poverty in Ecuador

We analyze the impact of the recent wave of international migration on poverty in Ecuador using propensity score matching. We draw the data from a household survey providing detailed information on migrants that is crucial for the estimation. The anal-ysis evidences a significant impact of migration on poverty among migrant households, which is substantially lower than what we find when, as the literature does, we focus on recipient households. We explore the factors that can account for the divergence in the results. Our analysis further strengthens the choice of defining migration rather than the receipt of remittances as the treatment of interest