Climate element of migration decision in Ghana: Micro Evidence

Franklin Amuakwa-Mensah

No 2015.18, Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: The debate about how environmental or climate factors affect migration decisions has generated a lot of interest in recent times, however empirical studies about the subject are limited and fragmented. This paper investigates the effect of climate factors on migration decisions by comparing the 2005/06 and 2012/13 rounds of Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS5 and GLSS6), using Heckman two-stage method to account for selectivity bias. The climate condition in various ecological zones of Ghana is used as a proxy to investigate the effect of climate elements on migration decision. Results show that socio-economic factors such as anticipated welfare gains, household size, education, the sector of employment and others, together with climatic element do significantly affect an individual’s migration decision. Findings further suggest a positive effect of climate element on migration decisions. The coastal savannah and forest ecological zones have a greater probability of accommodating more in-migrants relative to the northern savannah ecological zone. In addition, marginal effects reveal that the probability to migrate to coastal savannah zone relative to northern zones is higher than the probability to migrate to forest zones relative to northern zone. Moreover, anticipated welfare gains reinforce the effect of climate elements and also entrenches the divergence between the probability of migrating to coastal and forest zones relative to the northern zones. With the current climate change of high temperature and low rainfall, migration may be considered as one of the several adaptation strategies in response to changes in the environment.

Keywords: Climate; environment; migration; Heckman two-stage; Ghana. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O15 Q54 Q57 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-int and nep-mig
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http://faere.fr/pub/WorkingPapers/Amuakwa-Mensah_FAERE_WP2015.18.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fae:wpaper:2015.18

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