Climate Change, Natural Disasters and Migration : An Empirical Analysis in Developing Countries

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between natural disasters caused by climate change and migration by interesting in the migration rates and the education level in developing countries. Many studies such as the Stern review (2007) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) predict an intensification of climate change for the following years. Thus, climate change has taken an essential place in the world governance. The relationship between climate change, natural disasters and migration is crucial because the management of supplementary migratory flows due to environmental degradation make the migration issues coming from developing countries more complicated for developed countries. We investigate this relationship by using panel data from developing countries in order to see the effect of the natural disasters on migration rates and according to the educational level. Estimations are made with country fixed effects estimator through an accurate econometric model. The results confirm previous studies, namely natural disasters are positively associated with emigration rates. But beyond this result, the main contribution of this paper is to show that natural disasters due to climate change exacerbate brain drain in developing countries by involving the migration of high skilled people when countries are the most vulnerable and need an important support from the skilled workers to deal with natural disasters damages. The paper also shows that this effect is different according to the geographical position