Migrants' Home Town Associations and Local Development in Mali

This paper explores the impact of Malian migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) located in France on the provision of local public goods in Mali. To this end, we compute an original dataset on all the HTAs that have been created by Malian migrants in France since 1981 and geo-localize their interventions on the Malian territory. Thanks to four waves of Malian census, we also build a panel dataset on the provision of a range of public goods in all Malian villages over the 1976-2009 period. These two sources of data allow us to implement a difference-in-differences strategy, and to compare villages with and without an HTA, before and after HTAs developed their activity in Mali. We find that Malian HTAs have significantly contributed to improve the provision of schools, health centers and water amenities over the 1987-2009 period. When looking at the timing of the treatment, we observe that the difference between treated and control villages in terms of water amenities is mainly driven by the second period of observation (1998-2009), while schools and health centers exhibit significant differences during the whole period.