Abstract
Migration and climate change are two of the most important challenges the world currently faces. They are connected as climate change may stimulate or hinder migration. One of the sectors strongly affected by climate change is agriculture, which is the source of income for most of the world's poor. Climate change may affect agricultural productivity and hence migration because of its impact on average temperatures and rainfall and because it increases the frequency and intensity of weather shocks. In this paper we use data on 108 countries from 1960 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between weather variations, changes in agricultural productivity and international migration. We find that negative shocks to agricultural productivity caused by climate fluctuations significantly increase emigration from developing countries, an especially strong impact in poor countries but less so in middle income countries. These results are robust to the definitions of the poor country sample, and to several checks and alternative explanations suggested by the literature. Importantly, our results point to a causal interpretation of the agricultural channel to explain the climate change-migration nexus.
Highlights
In recent years, the empirical literature on the relationship between migration and climatic change has been growing rapidly and environmental factors are increasingly recognized as an important driver of both internal and cross-border migration (Berlemann and Steinhardt, 2017)
In the first stage we study how variations in climate change may have an effect on agricultural outcomes, and, how these effects may impact on migration
Only variations in agricultural outcomes that are associated with changes in climate are used to estimate the effect of agriculture on migration in the model
Summary
The empirical literature on the relationship between migration and climatic change has been growing rapidly and environmental factors are increasingly recognized as an important driver of both internal and cross-border migration (Berlemann and Steinhardt, 2017). Within the recent macroeconomic literature on climate change and international migration the impact of the increasing average surface temperature on agricultural productivity has been suggested as a potential key factor of the decision to migrate (Cai et al, 2016; Cattaneo and Peri, 2016). This is because, on the one hand, agriculture is the main source of income and employment in the rural areas of developing countries, where the majority of migrants is coming from. Agriculture is the sector mostly affected by climate change with important implications for agricultural productivity, rural livelihoods and food security, especially in the developing world (Lobell et al, 2011; FAO, 2017)
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