Michał Burzyński, Frédéric Docquier, Hendrik Scheewel
Abstract This paper investigates the long-term effects of climate change on the size, skillcomposition and geography of labor migration. Our world economy model distin-guishes between many spatial units and fully endogenizes the dyadic structure ofmigration. The model is calibrated to match international and internal mobilitydata by education level from the last 30 years, and is then simulated under climatechange variants. Depending on the climate scenario, we predict mobility responsesin the range of 100 to 230 million adult people over the course of the 21st century.Most of these movements are local or inter-regional. South-South international mi-gration responses are negligible, while the South-North migration response is of the”brain drain” type and induces a permanent increase in the stock of foreigners inthe OECD countries in the range of 5 to 10% only. Changes in the sea level mainlytranslate into local movements. On the contrary, inter-regional and internationalmovements are sensitive to temperature-related changes in productivity. We finallyshow that relaxing international migration restrictions may exacerbate the povertyeffect of climate change if policymakers are unable to select/screen individuals inextreme poverty.
Open model file: model.ipynb
Link to article: https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2021.6