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Why do emigration rates vary across Latin America? Since more than three-quarters of Latin America’s emigrants go to the United States, the paper estimates a model of emigration to the United States to isolate the fundamentals driving Latin American emigration. The model is estimated separately for all sending countries and for Latin America, asking whether migrants from the two respond differently to fundamentals. They do not. The estimates are then used to identify the sources of Latin American emigration since the early 1970s and compares them with those of Africa and Asia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper draws on recent evidence––economic, sociological and anthropological––from Latin America to forward a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated microentrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. It offers alternative explanations for many of the characteristics of the sector customarily regarded as evidence of its inferiority. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]