Could climate change be a driver of migration flows from Asia? A panel data analysis

Abstract

Climate change can be a determinant factor when we consider the reasons behind human mobility. In this paper, we aim to shed light upon the connection between climate change and international migration from Asia. This region is one of the most affected across the globe, due to the vulnerability of its inhabitants to climate-related events based on various factors. We study migration of the people from 44 Asian countries to 29 OECD destination countries during 2000–2020. We employ the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator (PPML) with fixed effects, and the main specification uses temperature changes as a proxy for climate change. The results show that climate change plays an important role in migration from Asia. For robustness checks, we change the proxy for the climate change, by using natural disasters and CO2 emissions. Results are stable, as we find a significant influence of climate change on migration.

Keywords

• Climate change
• international migration
• temperature
• PPML