Climate change, education and mobility in Africa

Christoph Deuster ()

NOVAFRICA Working Paper Series from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics, NOVAFRICA

Abstract: What is the relationship between climate change and human capital ac- cumulation? Through which mechanisms do weather changes affect tertiary educational attainment in African economies? This paper investigates the potential link between climate change and high-skilled human capital formation in Africa. In order to do so, a two-sector, world economy model that endogenizes education decisions and internal migration decisions is developed. This stylized model predicts that negative climatic conditions increase the share of people moving internally from rural to urban areas. This in turn leads to a larger future share of individuals investing in tertiary education, because the access and returns to education are higher in urban areas. These theoretical predictions are empirically validated by a panel data analysis at the country level, and a cross-sectional data analysis at the province level. The panel data set includes 37 African countries and covers the time period between 1960 and 2010. The cross-sectional data set includes 111 provinces in 17 African economies. A linear regression analysis shows that weather changes and educational attainment are correlated. A Two-Stage least squares regression analysis indicates that this effect results from the impact of climatic variation on internal migration. The research leads to the conclusion that adverse weather changes may have the unexpected effect of increasing high-skilled educational attainment in African economies.

Keywords: Human capital; Migration; Climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://novafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1904.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unl:novafr:wp1904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NOVAFRICA Working Paper Series from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics, NOVAFRICA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Susana Lopes ().