Development Policy Centre Deputy Director Ryan Edwards and Dung Doan, an Economist in the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs team explain how the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey was a comprehensive study of Pacific migrants working in Australia and New Zealand.
Development Policy Centre Deputy Director Ryan Edwards and Dung Doan, an Economist in the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs team, discuss the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey, which was conducted between 2020 and 2023.
Edwards and Doan explain how the joint research project between the Australian National University and the World Bank was a comprehensive study of Pacific migrants working in Australia and New Zealand.
They discuss that although migrants and their families perceived migration as beneficial to Pacific communities, the survey identified several issues that need to be addressed.
Read the survey report, The gains and pains of working away from home.
Read the Devpolicy Blog series related to the survey.
The Development Policy Centre received funding from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey Wave One through the Pacific Research Program.
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Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre. We’re part of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.
This is episode six in our 2024 season, which is a new beginning for the podcast after a hiatus of two years. We're bringing you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and in-depth documentary features relating to the topics we research at the centre – Australia's overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and Indo-Pacific regional and global development.
Please note: We provide transcripts for information purposes only. Anyone accessing our transcripts undertake responsibility for assessing the relevance and accuracy of the content. Before using the material contained in a transcript, the permission of the relevant presenter should be obtained.
The views presented in this podcast are the views of the host and guests. They do not necessarily represent the views or the official position of the Development Policy Centre.
Ryan Edwards 00:05
There's really few policies in the toolkit that just have the transformative potential for individuals, communities and even countries as migration does. And even just in the first wave of the PLMS, we see that earnings to participants alone are between three and 10 times what that worker earn back home as the primary earner in their household and some 60% of that is left to save or to send home after their expenses abroad. So they're quite big gains.
Acknowledgement of Country 00:35
We wish to acknowledge the indigenous people of Australia, the wider Asia Pacific region and other parts of the world and express our respect for their traditional knowledge and practices, which stemmed from a deep connection to the lands and waters they have inhabited for millennia.
Amita Monterola 00:54
Welcome to Devpolicy Talks. Today, we look at the gains and pains of Pacific labour mobility. I'm Amita Monterola, editor of the Devpolicy Blog, and I'm excited to be co-hosting the new season of this podcast with Robin Davies. We'll bring you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and in depth documentary features related to the topics we research here at the Development Policy Centre. I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people in the Centre's cottage on the ANU campus. I'm joined today by the two principal investigators of the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey. Ryan Edwards, Devpolicy's deputy director who's also in Canberra, and Dung Doan, an Economist at the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs team, who's joining us from the lands of the Gadigal people in Sydney. Welcome Ryan and Dung. Ryan, let's start by talking about why labour mobility is part of the Centre's work on development.
Ryan Edwards 01:55
There's far more to development than just aid, which we write quite a lot about. Amongst all policy areas. in fact, you'll be hard pressed to find a more important and transformational activity for development than migration. Indeed, finding ways to allow someone to move where they're more productive and can earn more is among, if not the most cost effective and effective poverty reduction and welfare improving intervention that humankind hasn't invented yet. We do have a special focus at the centre not just on global development, but development in the Pacific region in particular, that migration has historically been incredibly important. For decades, Pacific countries have been asking for more labour mobility opportunities, going back to the PACER Plus negotiations and before. This is due to relatively limited domestic demand and employment opportunities and the small market size of these countries. Since then, in no small part due to our research and policy engagement, going back to the pilot Seasonal Worker Program in 2012, when we first put out a paper on this, through to the Pacific Engagement Visa today, labour mobility in the Pacific now seems to be getting the attention that it needs and arguably deserves. But not just by policymakers interested in the Pacific, but right across the Australian Government and many other governments too. We are part of the ANU [Crawford School of Public Policy]. And that means two things for how we work. First being part of the university, we need to make sure our research is rigorous, and high quality and of an academic standard and independent. Second, we often want to relate it to policy be that policy priorities today, emerging priorities, or where we think the discussion should be going in the future. So when it comes to our work on migration and in the Pacific, we tend to take an empirical lens to issues. And this is incredibly important when most research on the region isn't especially empirical or data driven.
Amita Monterola 03:37
Ryan, given the importance of migration, what areas did the Centre choose to focus its research on?
Ryan Edwards 03:44
Early on, we identified the barriers to the [Australian] seasonal worker programs' growth, and since then, it has been reformed and it's grown like wildfire since then. After that, together with the World Bank, in the landmark Pacific possible work, we sought out to quantify the potential economic gains for labour mobility for the region and prosecute that case. And since then, through our large scale survey data collection, and survey work the bank did separately before that, we've shed light on some important new issues and indeed, help to issue an important corrective on some of the more unhelpful and often emotive narratives that tend to pervade public discussions on migration.
Amita Monterola 04:21
So Ryan, can you give us some examples of those narratives which are not so helpful?
Ryan Edwards 04:26
So for migration law, generally, it's common to hear concerns about migrants taking Australians or other receiving country people's jobs. It's been related to the housing crisis here. In sending countries people often talk about brain drain concerns. And all three of these issues are more complicated and this simple view is in short, wrong, or not consistent with the evidence when we take a careful look at it. For Pacific migration and PALM scheme [Australia's Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme] in particular, in recent years, there was rising concern about worker exploitation and welfare, but not really much data and evidence And what we found in the survey was that most workers are in fact, quite satisfied here. This scheme was also recently reformed because of concerns that workers were not getting enough hours. And these were quite high profile cases and reports. But our data showed that this wasn't actually the really big issue that it was perceived to be, with people getting similar hours, whether they were in full time work or in seasonal work, and these reforms have since been reversed to try and rescue employee demand and recover the scheme's currently stalled growth.Now, Dung, how does labour mobility fit into the World Bank's agenda?
Dung Doan 05:34
Amita, the World Bank has been doing research on migration and labour mobility in the Pacific for more than 10 years now. Some of that research are in collaboration with Development Policy Centre, and this is part of our broader agenda to support employment, human capital development and economic development in Pacific island countries. It is also part of a broader analytical and advisory services agenda on migration that the World Bank has been doing across the world. In the Pacific Beyond research, we are also implementing a project in PNG to strengthen government systems that support women, support workers and to households to benefit from overseas employment opportunities.
Amita Monterola 06:15
Between 2020 and 2023, the World Bank and the Centre undertook a joint comprehensive research project, the Pacific labour mobility survey. It was quite an ambitious task, how it was designed to ensure that the survey records reliable information and perspectives of Pacific workers and their families, Dung?
Dung Doan 06:38
The Pacific Labour Mobility Survey or the PLMS, as we call it for short, is envisioned to be a large and comprehensive audited survey on Pacific Labour Mobility. It has been designed to collect a wide range of information from a large and representative sample of workers and families across countries and across the labour mobility schemes in the region, in particular, the PALM Scheme and the RSE scheme [New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme]. Now there are two aspects of the design of the survey. One is who we interviewed, and two is what questions we asked them. In terms of the respondents who interviewed, the first wave of the survey covered three countries, Tonga, and Vanuatu, the two largest participant in the schemes, and Kiribati, which is very different - it's small and far away, and which means workers have to travel much further and incur higher costs to reach Australia and New Zealand. We covered these three countries to allow us to capture the experience of not only the major participants but also the smaller ones. And within each of these countries, there are three groups of respondents. One is the migrant workers who are working in Australia and New Zealand, two is the family of those workers, and three is other families that do not participate in the scheme, which will allow us to compare the experience of the family in the scheme and those who are not. In terms of the selection of the particular respondents, the survey samples were designed on the total survey error framework that aim to minimize errors and bias at every stage of the process throughout preparation and implementation. The workers were selected from an extensive list of about 11,000 workers from Kiribati, Tonga and Vanuatu, based on the two stage stratified sampling approach. That list itself was constructed based on information from various sources, including the labour sending units and country liaison officers from the Pacific, the employers, recruitment agencies, etc. These allow us to minimise the potential risk that certain group of workers are approached and invited to participate in the survey. In terms of the selection of the households, we conducted the first wave of the survey by using both face-to-face data collection and phone based data collection because of COVID-19. In the face-to-face segment of the household survey, the selected households were selected using probability proportional to size sample new approach, based on the latest population census listing, and the sample frame of the workers would take the input from experts and the Tongan Statistics Department. The phone base segment of the household survey use a combination of probability proportional to size sampling approach, as well as random digit dialling. This resulted in a very last samples. According to our analysis to date, it is the largest sample of its type in the Pacific, covering more than 2000 workers and more than 4200 houses. The questionnaire, meaning the questions that we asked the respondents were designed based on international best practice. The structure and the type of question that we asked and highly similar to typical questions in national labour force surveys and national household income and expenditure surveys that national statistics officials usually do. It covered both objective indicators such as living conditions, income expenditures, as well as objective perceptions by the workers and their families. The questionnaire designed follows an iterative and consultative process, where we consult with an expert international expert academies and others that are familiar with the context of the region's and the topic of labour mobility, as well as with government counterparts. The questionnaire was then translated into local languages, piloted field tested and then revised again and again, after each phases, before we finally finalise it and implement it in the field.
Amita Monterola
The COVID-19 pandemic occurred during your planning process. How did this change how you administered the survey?
Dung Doan
It changed it a lot. It made a big impact on our planning and implementation of the survey. So the survey from the beginning was envisioned to be done in person, meaning face-to-face data collection, and we managed to do part of it in Tonga in person, and then the volcanic eruption and the tsunami that follow happen. And then we had COVID-19 that hit the whole region. So those two big shock forced us to switch to phone based data collection. And the key changes that occurred is that we had to shorten the questionnaire. Because when you meet people and sit down with them face-to-face, you can prolong the conversation because you are there and you can maintain the contact and interaction. Whereas over the phone, people might be busy and they can't stay focused with you for a long period of time. And because of that, we have to adjust to the duration and some of the questions to make sure that it fit into a phone base interview. And again, this process of adjusting and revising the questionnaire, followed international best practice on how such survey is designed. And it also follow rigorous field testing to make sure the questions not understood and clearly interpreted over the phone conversation. And regardless of whether it was done by phone or face-to-face, we receive a lot of customisation and suggestions to make sure the question wordings, the response options that we offer in the questionnaire fit into the local context, for examples, certain options in terms of education categories, or grade classes were not available in certain countries, but available in others for examples. Also, the question about income and expenditure need to be framed in a way that is easily understood for an audience that is not very familiar with the concept of financial management. So that whole process of designing, testing and consultation to make sure that it is understood and well interpreted in the local context was a key part of the design.
Amita Monterola 12:58
The report from the first wave of the survey was published last November and it's titled The gains and pains of working away from home. Ryan, can you tell us about the key findings relating to the Pacific workers?
Ryan Edwards 13:11
The main finding from the first wave was really the splash that it caused in terms of the interpretation. The large scale data really did challenge some popular misperceptions and demonstrate that despite all the challenges that were going on, despite the rapid scheme growth, despite the pandemic, they're still seen as overwhelmingly positive by participants, their families and their communities. And we don't just find evidence of positive economic impacts, which are usually taken as a given. But we also find quite positive social impacts as well. And the majority of workers, as I mentioned, we're all quite happy and satisfied, not just overall, but across many specific dimensions. And with regards to this satisfaction on the job, we don't really find any evidence of decline in satisfaction during the scheme's growth and during the pandemic, which was quite a turbulent time in terms of policy changes, and how things have been implemented, which suggests that actually, it has probably been quite well managed on the Australian side. That said, there was a small portion of workers who did not hesitate to voice their concerns and their dissatisfaction with us.
Amita Monterola 14:17
What were the workers main concerns?
Ryan Edwards 14:19
Earnings not meeting their expectations. Sometimes excessive or non-transparent salary deductions or sometimes people are just not that familiar with or they don't understand the deduction process that well. Workers have a lot of demand for more flexibility and portability to be able to change employers while they're abroad, even though it's very much still an employer sponsored program. And of course, there's pressure on families due to their family members, the primary earners, being away working in these schemes. We've written a fair bit about these issues both ourselves, but also platforming a pretty diverse range of views on the Devpolicy blog. And in the report, we do offer some practical suggestions for policy changes around these issues.
Amita Monterola 14:58
So as you say, workers of course, are only half of the story. So could you tell us about the impacts on Pacific households that stay behind according to the survey data? And can you tell us about the experience of these families?
Dung Doan 15:13
From the data that we have collected through the PLMS, as well as through the complimentary qualitative interviews that were done on more than 400 respondents across the three countries - Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati - we found that participation in labour mobility schemes overall appear to strengthen family relationships and empower women. Four out of five workers that we interviewed reported an improved relationship with their children who stay behind at home, and two out of three reported improve marital relationships with their partners. When we tried to dig deeper through the qualitative interviews it turns out that increase income help decrease arguments between partners, especially where money stress was previously a source of conflict. Workers also mentioned improved communication, better understanding and better appreciation and respect of each other's roles in the households helped improve their relationship with their partner as well. And in terms of the gender attitude, changes in gender perceptions were reported among both the male and female workers. The vast majority of female workers in the scheme experienced greater agency, greater control over financial resources within the household and the male workers in the scheme, it appears that their experience overseas helped to increase their willingness to contribute to household chores when they return, [For example] contributing to caretaking responsibility when they return, as well as better understanding of their spouse contribution to the house. Having said that, a non-eligible share of workers do report worsening relationships with their spouse and some with their partners, in particular, about one fourth reported worsening marital relationships and about 7% reported worsening relationships with their kids. And this is consistent with the qualitative evidence that we found through the in-depth qualitative interviews as well, where specific cases were reported about suspicion of extramarital affairs or issues on behaviors of children or children being neglected. From the household side, most households that we interviewed, perceive labour mobility as either positive or very positive, both for themselves and for the community. And what is interesting is this perception is very similar between the households that are in the scheme and the households that are not in the scheme. But again, on the other side, these households do report and raise concerns about the absence of the workers. Some of those concerns are increased use of alcohol, and then labour shortage in the community, especially in a community where a large number of adults move overseas to work in the scheme and they face local shortage for community work. There is concerns about increased workload for the remaining family member, especially for the women who stay behind. And there are reports of adverse perception and moral judgment towards returned female migrant workers, especially when only a few women from the community participate in the scheme. There was so concerns about some male workers squandering their pay while they're overseas and they end up going home with little saving for the family.
Amita Monterola 18:36
It seems I think I keep reading articles about suspicions of extramarital affairs. I was just wondering, in terms of the survey, how did you broach the issue of things like adultery and extramarital affairs?
Dung Doan 18:53
So I have to admit that issues like extramarital affairs or GBV, gender based violence, are super sensitive. And it's really hard to distill the information through conversation, regardless of whether we do it over the phone or face-to-face or through some other models of interviews. Because people are not usually willing to talk about those issues. And especially they are more reluctant to talk about their own cases. So what we try to do is by combining the quantitative and qualitative information to distill the finding that we have reported so far in in our report. And that's what we see, there are reports of suspicion, there are reports of marital breakdown, there are reports of adverse impact on children such as neglect or children having dropped out of school because they are left behind with their grandparents who can't really discipline them as as they wish. But those are also other reports and they exist out there and they should be they should be addressed. But it's hard to put a hard number on how many cases or how many percent are they in terms of whether those suspicions are real cases of an affair or their suspicions? And how many of them have suspicions versus not having suspicions? Ryan, did you want to come in on that?
Ryan Edwards 20:13
One exciting development is that the government has rolled out a family accompaniment pilot where family members can join long-stay PALM workers in the country. It's quite small and limited to start with at the moment. Although I guess it's going to be quite difficult to properly assess this pilot and really learn too much about it without a rigorous counterfactual based evaluation design baked into it from the outset.
Amita Monterola
Yeah, it must be a really difficult thing to look at.
Dung Doan 20:39
Maybe I can add one tiny bit is that through our qualitative interviews, we do see report of women being able to leave abusive relationships, because participation in the program, in the scheme allow them to have more financial resources, more agency and more empowerment, to leave such bad relationships.
Amita Monterola 21:03
Ryan, we've talked about some of the pains just now. But what makes labour mobility initiatives worth it in terms of development? How big are the gains?
Ryan Edwards 21:12
As I mentioned at the outset, there's really few policies in the toolkit that have the transformative potential of individuals, communities, and even countries as migration does. And even just in the first wave of the PLMS, we see that earnings to participants alone are between three and 10 times what that worker earned back home as the primary earner in their household, and some 60% of that is left to save or to send home after their expenses abroad. So they're quite big gains and more is remitted in just regular cash every week or so. Not in kind, not the lump sums, not the super, that's brought back at the end, than the primary earner would earn back home as it stands. So think of all that cumulatively. And then beyond the individuals moving in the benefits to the migrants themselves, which I think we should centre when talking about migration, there's many other indirect channels of development impacts that have been quite well documented in the empirical literature. And I'm not just talking here about remittances which are often most visible and enormous and can percolate through out communities and the macro economy, but more indirect and important impacts on human capital, aspirations, norms, trade, and really so much more.
Amita Monterola 22:21
I know that you two have been working very hard on wave two of the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey, which will start later this year. Ryan, why is it important to do the survey again? And how is this wave going to be different to the first?
Ryan Edwards 22:36
Well, I'll stay on the first for just a moment. The first wave of the survey was in fact many different firsts, it was the first large-scale data collection on Pacific labour mobility following the pandemic, the first serious data collection effort since the [Pacific Australia Labour Mobility] scheme was introduced in 2019, the first comparative data collection across these three schemes that allows us to compare relative situations in each one. And to our knowledge is also the first real open access of a resource of this nature that links migrants and their households together. So building on that, probably the most important thing we did set out to do at the outset, was to design the PLMS to be a longitudinal panel tracking migrant workers and their families over time, to allow us to answer a number of important quantitative and indeed qualitative policy and lifecycle questions that you just can't credibly answer without such longitudinal survey data. And to answer your question about how Wave Two will differ from the first wave, well, there's at least three important ways. The first wave had to be moved to phone based implementation due to the border closures. And so we're moving back to face-to-face, which is really important for being both present in the context, but also to avoid the disadvantages of phone based surveys. Second, we're expanding the survey from just three countries up to six, which is a much more ambitious project and a far larger public good that we'll be providing at the end. And third, this thematic focus is going to shift a little bit because we've answered a lot of questions in the first wave. And we're now going to focus on those that are better suited to look at with the longitudinal data such as migration patterns over time, long term changes in livelihood strategies, people's careers, and child and human capital development. We can also look at the reintegration of workers who have now come home from the first wave and the impacts of recent policy reforms that have happened between the two.
Amita Monterola 24:28
So Dung, in this second phase, how are respondents going to be selected this time around and how is their information be treated once it's collected?
Dung Doan 24:37
In the second wave of the PLMS, we still aim to interview three main groups of respondents, the workers, their households, and the non-migrant households. We aim to re-interview the respondent from wave one in order to track changes in their living conditions and their circumstances. There will be a replacement for those who we cannot recontact and because in Wave Two, we are expanding the coverage of the survey to new countries, then in those new countries there will be new respondents of course. In terms of the sampling strategy, however, we will still follow the same principles and statistical approach that we did in Wave One in order to maintain the rigor and the representativeness of the samples. In terms of the information and how the information is treated. I want to emphasise here, participation in the survey is completely voluntary. When we select potential respondents, we will approach them and invite them to participate, but it is completely their choice whether they want to participate or not. If they refuse, no questions are asked, we will stop there. And during the interview, respondents can stop the interview at any point that they want, they can also refuse to ask a certain question that they do not want to provide an answer for. And all of these interviews will be done in the national language by researchers who speak the language and are familiar with with their culture to make sure that they feel comfortable and they can convey the message and information in a comfortable and reliable manner. And all the information that we collect will be treated as confidential. No personal information will ever be published or shared without explicit permission from the respondent. The data that we have collected will be reported in an aggregate manner only. And the vision of this survey is we will publish that collected data for as a public good, but that data will be completely anonymised. It means that all personal information will be removed, and the data will be processed and anonymized in a way to minimise the risk that people can actually guess who the respondent might be. So no names, no contact details, no phone numbers, regardless of the household or the employers or the workers themselves. And certain information will be hidden away, such as certain age or certain information on their location, or their demographics and statistics, in order to make sure that no one can make an informed and reliable guess on who that might be in real life.Well, that sounds like you have a really large data set from phase one, and you're going to have an even larger set from phase two.
Amita Monterola
Can you tell us a little bit about the other research that's been conducted? Besides these initial survey reports?
Dung Doan
The report that we have published on the PLMS data wave one, it is only the starting point. The data is there for further research, and I'm sure it will be input and feed into many future research ideas. From the World Bank side beyond the PLMS, there was a World Development Report published last year in 2023. It is one of the flagship analytical products that the World Bank produce every year, and the World Development Report 2023 looked at experiences of migrants, refugees and society. And coming up this year, we are preparing a regional report on migration that covers the Pacific as well as East Asian countries. We are also working on an impact evaluation of the project on enhancing labour mobility in PNG. So that's another upcoming item that we have on our agenda. Thanks, Ryan and Tom for your time today. We look forward to having you join us to discuss the findings of phase two.
Ryan Edwards 28:32
Thank you for having us. It's been a real pleasure.
Dung Doan 28:34
Thank you for having us.
Amita Monterola 28:35
You've been listening to Ryan Edwards Devpolicy's deputy director and Dung Doan, an Economist with the World Bank's social protection and jobs team.The Development Policy Centre received funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey Wave One through the Pacific Research Program.
Outro 29:00
Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University's Development Policy Centre. Show notes are posted to Simplecast. Our producers are Robin Davies Amita Monterola and Jackie Hanafie. You can read and subscribe to our daily blogs on aid, international development and the Pacific at devpolicy.org. And you can follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. You can send us feedback and ideas for episodes to devpolicy@anu.edu.au. Join us again in another fortnight for the next episode of Devpolicy Talks.