Does local non-farm income moderate the intensity of climate change induced migration in India?

Gauri Sreekumar, Sabuj Kumar Mandal and Anviksha Drall

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2024, vol. 46, issue 6, 1125-1145

Abstract: While the impact of climate change on migration is well documented in the literature, very little is known about the moderating impact of local non-farm income on climate change induced migration. To fill this gap in the literature, the paper combines real time weather data provided by Indian Meteorological Department with a very rich household data on Indian states belonging to the eastern and semi-arid tropic regions collected by ICRISAT to investigate whether farmers always resort to migration or take it up as a second-best option only after they fail to diversify locally on the face of climate change induced crop loss. Using recursive econometric model, it is observed that households first try to diversify their income by engaging in local non-farm activities and availability of local non-farm income further moderates the effect of climate change induced yield loss on migration. Higher rural out migration may adversely impact the agricultural sector and affect sustainable urbanization, Also, decision to migrate is often challenging as it necessitates leaving behind social and community networks. Therefore, our findings offer valuable insights and discusses important policy recommendations towards improving the access to local non-farm activities.

Keywords: Migration; Climate change; Local non-farm income; Recursive model; Three Stage Least Squares (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C5 O15 Q12 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893824001194
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jpolmo:v:46:y:2024:i:6:p:1125-1145

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2024.07.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Policy Modeling is currently edited by A. M. Costa

More articles in Journal of Policy Modeling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().