Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration

By Michel Beine, Christopher A. Parsons. Social Science Research Network, 2015

465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration. We distinguish between unexpected short-run factors, captured by natural disasters, as well as long-run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long-run averages. Starting from a simple neo-classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960-2000 that allows us to control for numerous time-varying and time invariant factors. We find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable. In contrast, there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages. We further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c403ba1856da94a8e4b56a53ffd56df932e8841

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Emigration and Democracy (2011, unknown): “1 + a we t + 6 we i;t (5) Beine and Parsons (2015) found no direct impact of climatic factors on international migration using migration data in 10-year intervals over the period 1960-2000.”
Internal Labor Migration as a Shock Coping Strategy: Evidence from a Typhoon (2016, background): “10Belasen and Polachek (2013) provide a useful review of this literature. incidence following natural disasters (Gray and Mueller 2012b, Badiani and Safir 2008, Beine and Parsons 2015), others find ambiguous or negative effects (Gray and Mueller 2012a, Tse 2011).”
The Migration Response to Increasing Temperatures (2016, background): “This ﬁnding is consistent with the analysis of Beine and Parsons (2015) who do not ﬁnd direct impact of the same type of events on bilateral migration and with the analysis of Bohra-Mishra et al (2014) for the migration behavior in Indonesian villages.”
Climate change and migration: Is agriculture the main channel? (2019, background): “On the other hand, there is the recent body of the literature that investigates the direct and indirect relationship between climate change and international migration (Beine and Parsons, 2015; Feng et al., 2010; Cattaneo and Peri, 2016; Cai et al., 2016; Maurel and Tuccio, 2016). Looking at the fir”
A meta-analysis of the literature on climate change and migration (2021, methodology): “…literature: • Temperature or precipitation levels (see for example Cattaneo and Peri (2016)); • Temperature or precipitation deviations (see for example Beine and Parsons (2015)); • Temperature or precipitation anomalies (see for example Beine and Parsons (2015)); • Temperature or precipitation…”
Remittances and Vulnerability in Developing Countries (2014, background): “17 These effects remain insignificant when disasters are expressed as log (1þannual frequency), as in Beine and Parsons (2015) and when armed conflicts are expressed in terms of their annual frequency.”
Climate Variability and International Migration: The Importance of the Agricultural Linkage (2016, background): “it t i i it it year c h Y M μ γ γ + + + + = ln ln 1 0 [9]”
Do climate variations explain bilateral migration? A gravity model analysis (2015, background): “Finally, Beine and Parsons (2013) consider both natural disasters and climatic variations as potential drivers of bilateral migration flows.”