Dear all,
I want to thank all the contributors for the thoughtful and constructive interventions so far. They will certainly be of great help to us in preparing a better report.
It is difficult to summarize and cover the richness and variety of the interventions received. I would like to just mention a few significant areas. Several contributions highlight the challenges involved in defining and empirically assessing rural migration due to heterogeneity in definitions and measurements. Others highlight the complexity of impacts of migration both on rural labour markets and livelihoods. Important insights were also presented concerning the challenge of structural transformation, in particular in relation to dwindling farm sizes and poor agricultural labour productivity resulting from demographic pressures in rural areas. Gender issues were also prominent, as well as reminders to go beyond mere economic impacts of migration and include broader social impacts.
I would also like to thank those who have made specific suggestions for improvements to the contents and outline of our report, as well as those who have provided specific references to literature and ongoing work or concrete country examples from your own experience examples. We are very much interested in concrete country cases, and I would like to encourage further contributions in this direction.
I look forward to the continuation of an interesting discussion.
Andrea
Andrea Cattaneo