Rural-urban migration and income disparity in Tunisia: A decomposition analysis

This paper investigates the main determinants of the welfare gap between rural-urban migrants and non-migrants (both urban and rural) in Tunisia. The lack of data on the expenditure of migrant and non-migrant households is overcome by applying the ELL (Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw) methodology. The decomposition results show a positive welfare gains from rural-to-urban migration, especially among the younger generation born after the failure of the collectivism experiment in 1961. The education level of the household's head and the household's size appear as the main sources of the welfare gap. The unconditional quantile regression decomposition shows that the endowment effect contributes more to the welfare gap than the discrimination effect at the bottom part of the welfare distribution.