 Unexpected heat suppresses emigration from the world's poorest countriesAshley Vicary No f3wvd_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science Abstract: Whether climate stress displaces people or traps them in place is unresolved. The common intuition is displacement: crops fail, heat becomes unliveable and people leave. Other work predicts the opposite for poor countries, where migration abroad is expensive and the shock that sharpens the wish to leave can destroy the means to go. Estimates disagree, partly because realized temperature mixes warming that households anticipated with warming they did not. I isolate the unanticipated part with temperature forecast errors, the warmth or cold a forecast missed, and estimate their effect on monthly international migration from countries holding most of the world’s population. Here I show that unexpected warmth does not detectably move migration on average, but that in low-income countries an unexpectedly hot month lowers departures over the following year. No richer income group shows a detectable response. The migration suppression is strongest where incomes depend on agriculture, also appears outside the growing season and leaves in-migration flat, consistent with heat removing the means to move. For the poorest countries, unexpected heat may hold people back rather than push them abroad. Projections and policies built around displacement may overstate departures from these countries and overlook those who cannot afford to leave. Date: 2026-10-07 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:f3wvd_v1 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.