Abstract
International migration is increasing as people flee conflict and political instability and seek better opportunities elsewhere. It is expected that climate change will give a further impetus to international migration, especially from poorer countries who will find it more difficult to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change on land degradation, freshwater availability, and extreme weather events. According to the Stern Report, there could be as many as 200 million ‘environmentally forced migrants’ (EFMs) by 2050 due to climate change (Stern, 2006).
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter draws extensively on Naudé (2008).
- 2.
Reuveny (2007) discusses 38 cases of environmental migration events in recent years. Out of these, 15 occurred in Africa, involving more than 20 million people.
- 3.
It is estimated that 1 out of 3 refugees worldwide are in Africa and that there are around 13 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Africa (Black, 2004).
- 4.
A discussion of these various estimators, routinely used in econometrics, falls outside the scope of this chapter. The interested reader can be referred to, for example, Wooldridge (2008) for an overview.
- 5.
The countries included are Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, DR Congo, Rep. Congo, Côte D’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Due to data limitations Equatorial Guinea, Mayotte, and Seychelles are excluded.
- 6.
There is a very strong positive linear relationship between population growth rates and net migration rates in the sample. The correlation coefficient between these is 0.81.
- 7.
The difficulty with selecting measures of institutional quality in regressions with economic growth is the eventual endogeneity of good institutions. To overcome this, a measure such as pre-colonial centralisation can be used. Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) argue that this measure, the proportion of the population of a country that lived under a strong hierarchical system of political centralisation before colonisation is strongly correlated with the success of subsequent post-independence governments to extend control, provides services and establishes legitimacy.
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Naude, W. (2010). Forced Migration from Sub-Saharan Africa: The Conflict–Environment Link. In: Afifi, T., Jäger, J. (eds) Environment, Forced Migration and Social Vulnerability. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12416-7_4
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