Do They Look for Informal Jobs ?: Migration of the Working Age in Indonesia

Characteristics of informal activity that are highly flexible in terms of working hours, barrier to entry, mobility, capital and skills requirement, have made informal jobs attractive for migrant workers in developing countries. Informal jobs are also theoretically claimed as a temporary position or transition for migrants who seek to work in more certain, formal jobs. Using individual’s jobs and migration history of adults obtained from the 2007 IFLS data from 2000--2007, this study aims to analyse how migration affects individual’s tendency to work in informal jobs by measuring the immediate effect of migration on the job's status. The result of clustered multinomial logit regression shows that individuals who migrate are less likely to work in informal job relative to formal job compared with individuals who do not migrate. This result contradicts the notion that migration is an act to look for opportunities with high uncertainty because migrants seem more likely to engage in formal jobs compared to non migrants. It may show that temporary positions into the formal jobs are not what the adult migrants in Indonesia are looking for.