International migration, climate change, and network effects: A worldwide study

PROJECT INFORMATION

Principal investigator (PI):

Paula Margaretic, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile, Chile

E-mail: paumargaretic@gmail.com,

Duration & amount:

(April 2023 - 2026) USD 99,600

Participating countries: 

Argentina and Chile

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The goal of this project is to investigate two important aspects of international migration. First, the project proposes a global framework (including more than 150 countries all over the world) to study the influence of climate change on migration. Our dataset spans the 30-year period over 1990-2017. To characterize countries, we include proxies for fast-and slow-onset meteorological events as a way of measuring countries' exposure to climate change, and a large set of country-specific socio-economic, health, political, and governance factors. Second, the project analyzes the role of neighboring countries on migration flows. To identify neighboring countries, we allow not only for geographical proximity, but also for economic, and cultural proximity between pairs of countries. The main contributions of this project are the following. First, we include a wide set of environmental variables with a global coverage which allows us to have a higher capability to incorporate climate change aspects into the migration analysis. Second, considering a large set of country-specific socio-economic, political, and demographic characteristics will allow us to: i) explore the contextual causes of migration and the dynamics of these; ii) disentangle the patterns distinguishing developed and developing economies through time, iii) quantify the feedback effects from socio-economic shocks affecting migration and reversely. Third, we propose a methodology to predict and simulate the expected impact on migration of major shocks (e.g., the Ukrainian war) and of various simulated patterns of climate change. Fourth, the existing procedures typically assume linear relationships between the socio-economic, demographic, political, environmental, weather and climate change determinants of migration flows. However, the connectivity migration matrices and the inter-relations among them are non-linear. To account for these non-linear relations, we rely on functional connectivity, and high-order functional connectivity, to characterize the collective dynamics in the migration networks.