MANILA, 19 August 2007 — Daughters of local people in Bukidnon province in the southern Philipines tend to send more of their earnings home than their sons, according to a study presented during a forum at the Ateneo de Manila University recently.

Filipino author Agnes Quisumbing, Ph. D., presented the paper titled “The Impact of Migration and Remittances on Assets, Consumption and Credit Constraints: Evidence from Bukidnon, Philippines.” Scott McNiven co-authored the study. Quisumbing is an economist of the World Bank.

During her presentation, Quisumbing said that daughters tend to remit more to their parents because they are “socialized to give more to their family.” Another reason cited is that sons have their own families to feed leaving the responsibility to daughters to earn for their old parents.

While some earning daughters become spinsters, others get married but still they remit more to their parents. Quisumbing encouraged the audience to have an anthropological study on this social behavior of daughters. She opined that because married daughters are not the head of the family, it is the husband’s income which they depend more on. The paper tackles internal migration in the Philippines but is a “steppingstone” to international migration, Quisumbing describes her study.

This confirms the Department of Labor and Employment’s statistics on employment status by sex. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that there are more women employed than men in 2006 and early part of 2007. Figures reveal that female employment rate is at 92.6 percent while male employment rate is at 91.8 percent. Women dominate the service sector as they work as domestic helpers and sales ladies. Feminists in the Philippines describe this phenomenon as the “feminization of labor” with the women performing jobs that are an “extension of their work at home.”

Quisumbing said that Bukidnon was chosen as the site of study because of its characteristics where there has been an increased economic activity as areas are devoted to corn production after sugar. Southern Bukidnon has 30 villages spread in its 10 municipalities. “The whole corn sector is already commercialized. There has been an increase in livestock production. Infrastructure has improved a lot. There is already a hotel in the area. Internet is also now available,” she revealed.

One area though which the study failed to identify is that lands in Bukidnon are being rented out to agricultural companies with most of the land now producing cash crops for export and sale outside of Bukidnon. These foreign agricultural companies hire men who can work as agricultural workers to till the land. Women, in this economic set-up, have to migrate to look for jobs suited to them.

In Bukidnon, 60 percent of parents have migrant children in urban areas. More than half of this 60 percent are women, the study said. Women also have higher education than men with two more years of schooling. Bukidnon has what the economist called “rural splits” where parents give their children portion of the land where they can build their own houses. Daughters migrate to urban areas for salaried work while most of the sons stay in rural areas because they inherit the land and provide for the parents when they reach old age.

Migrant children in urban areas send high remittances at an average of Php 11, 868 per month while children who live in their own households in the rural areas give their parents an average of Php 1, 386 monthly.

A big percent of the migrant children’s remittances is spent for schooling and food. It is easy to spot households with migrant children because parents have bigger houses, own big television sets and appliances, and younger siblings go to school.

“Remittances do not have an impact on credit status,” Dr. Quisumbing further said. “It enables receiving households to invest in assets such as consumer durables and human capital,” the World Bank economist further explained.