Environmental Degradation, Economic Fundamentals and Migration in the Asian Region

Abstract

Asia has many emerging economies and is a region with impressive economic growth. And labor mobility and migration have become a matter of concern in this area. However, studies on migration in this region still seem to focus heavily on economic aspects. This study will further focus on the aspect of environmental migration as a current global issue. By using the dynamic panel data of 47 Asian countries with random effect, fixed effect, and the two-step system GMM to discover the climatic factors and socio-economic factor on the international migration from 1990 to 2020 by five-year data. Our empirical findings confirm that climate change factors, including CO2 emissions, rainfall, and temperature have significantly impacted on the international migration in Asia. Furthermore, economic factors such as per capita income levels and economic growth have consistently reduced migration over the past three decades. These empirical results hold true across various sub-samples, regardless of the income level under consideration. Through these findings, this study proposes relevant policy implications which are related to environmental degradation and migration in Asia.