Social Networks and Labor Migration Decision: a Case of Intra-national Labor Migration from Nepal

Labor migration is an important issue in Nepal. Labor tends to migrate from rural to rural, rural to urban and urban to urban areas in search of better opportunities and better livelihoods. The social networks such as family members and friends living in those areas play crucial role for labor to decide which area to migrate. Social networks have more important role for rural to urban migration of labor than rural to rural or urban to urban migration. On an average, the impact of social networks in case of rural-urban migration of labor is found to be 6 times stronger in comparison to rural-rural migration and 24 times stronger in comparison to urban-urban migration. This is because in case of intra-regional migration, settlement is easier even without help of networks due to similarity in environment but in case of inter-regional migration, the environment totally changes and migrant labors need more help from their networks. Urban origin labors are found interested to migrate to other urban areas with the help of networks but they are found unwilling to migrate to rural area. Social networks are also found important for the newly migrant labor to find job.