Under the Radar: Measuring Temporary Mobility in Household Surveys — Evidence from Malawi

Temporary mobility is an important margin of adjustment to income and environmental risk, but what can standard surveys tell us about household mobility and migration, and what do they miss? We study short-term and short-distance mobility in five cross-sections of the Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS) between 2004/05 and 2024/25. Exploiting the temporal representativeness of the survey’s fieldwork, we document variation in household size and composition across interview months in rural and urban areas, indicating that the population covered by individual absence statistics varies with interview timing. The patterns are driven by both adult and child counts and variation in child mobility is at least as large as that of adults’ in every rural round and in three urban rounds. We compare annual absence with casual work locations and reported migration after shocks and find that only 12.4 percent of rural adults and 14.4 percent of urban adults who report casual work outside the village or town are recorded as absent, and of 37 households reporting shock-related migration, 29 have no listed member recorded as absent. The analysis points to important gaps in what standard household surveys can infer about mobility in developing settings.