Determinants of Rural-Urban Migrants’ Employment Choices in the Urban Labor Market: A Study from selected Cities in Central Oromia, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study investigates the determinants of rural-urban migrants’ employment choices in the urban labor market in central Oromia cities, Ethiopia. The study used a cross-sectional data obtained from rural-to-urban youth migrants, and it estimated multinomial logistic regression to analyze the data. For this purpose, after the urban labor market had been categorized into five urban employment segments, a multinomial logit model was employed to identify factors determining migrants’ job choices from these employment segments. The finding reveals that a migrant’s sex and his/her parent’s annual income have positive significant effects on all employment segments. Migrant’s marriage, information deficiency on job availability, being from small urban area, and father’s occupation have significant positive effects on self-employment, while lack of a city’s identification card for the immigrant and dispute in the city have significant negative effects on the segment. Migrant’s duration of living in cities, information deficiency on job availability, and father’s education and occupation have significant positive effects on informal private-employment. On the contrary, marriage, household size, and lack of identification card have negative impacts on the segment. A migrant’s age, preparatory schooling level, university education, access to registration, and advisory services in the city have significant positive effects on both (private and public) formal employments. The paper has made conclusions and drawn policy implications for possible interventions to urban labor market constraints.