Violence or Economics: What Drives Internal Migration in Guatemala?

The vast literature on interstate migration for developing countries has produced a standard migration model in which interstate migration depends on such factors as distance, wage and unemployment rates, educational characteristics, and average levels of human capital in source and destination areas. In several Latin American countries, however, there is strong reason to believe that a particular noneconomic variable - fear of death from political violence - plays a key role in many individuals' migration decisions. This is almost certainly true in Guatemala and El Salvador in Central America, and in Colombia and Peru in South America. A study strives to embed political violence within a standard economic model of migration. The hypothesis that violence is a key determinant of migration decisions in a country suffering from endemic political violence is tested. In particular, a nonlinear relationship is suggested between violence and migration; while violence is posited to affect migration at all nonzero levels, this effect intensifies as the level of violence escalates.