people

Anu Abraham is a development economist working as Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). 

Her current research focus is on the interaction between social and spatial mobility in the MigrationRhythms project which examines the role of migration in upward social mobility among middle class households in Asia. She is an expert in developing and implementing large scale surveys and is leading the team that works on survey data collection and quantitative analysis  of primary data across the four Asian cities – Hanoi, Karachi Mumbai and Manila. 

She has a PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her PhD research focused on the interaction between migration and development. Her primary research focus centers around labour migration and delves into aspects such as decision to migrate, destination choice, remittances, return and re-integration, and the interaction between migration and social mobility, and gender and human capital development, mostly from a Global South perspective. 

A large part of her work has focused on Gulf migration from Kerala, including the vulnerabilities faced by women migrant workers, food security among low skilled workers in the destination and the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on Indian migrant workers in the GCC. She has also been actively involved in discussion about labour migration from Kerala in many National and International forums, trying to draw attention to the life and work of migrants workers from Kerala. 

She has published in reputed journals such as Indian Journal of Labour Economics and Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of social and Economic change and also contributed to the India Migration Report 2020/2023, and South Asia Migration Report 2023. She has also written for newspapers such as The Hindu and The Scroll.