Climate migration frightens... climate poverty is frightening!

a column by Michał Burzyński, Christoph Deuster, Frédéric Docquier and Jaime de Melo for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

There has been much discourse on how long-term climate change will affect human mobility over the course of the 21st century.

This column estimates the long-term welfare and mobility responses to climate change. Depending on the scenario, climate change will force between 210 and 320 million people to move, mostly within their own countries. Massive international flows of climate refugees are unlikely, except under generalised and persistent conflicts. The poorest economies will be hardest hit, thus increasing global inequality and extreme poverty.

Figure 2 Number and type of climate migrants (million per 30-year window)

   

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As always I ask you to read the column for the full explanation of the figure above.

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The decline of northern England, 1780–2018

a column by Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Northern England is now less educated and less productive than the south. This north-south divide is often characterised by policymakers as evidence of market failure.

This column uses surname distributions to show that the northern decline can instead be explained by persistent outmigration of talent from the north. People of northern origin perform as well on average as those of southern origin. Talented northerners, however, are now mainly located in the south, where they are an economic elite.

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Eight Questions about Brain Drain

a Policy Research Working Paper (WPS5668) by John Gibson and David McKenzie published by The World Bank Development Research Group in May 2011 and included in the Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 25 Number 3 (Summer 2011)

Abstract

High-skilled emigration is an emotive issue that in popular discourse is often referred to as brain drain, conjuring images of extremely negative impacts on developing countries. Recent discussions of brain gain, diaspora effects, and other advantages of migration have been used to argue against this, but much of the discussion has been absent of evidence. This paper builds upon a new wave of empirical research to answer eight key questions underlying much of the brain drain debate:

1. What is brain drain?
2. Why should economists care about it?
3. Is brain drain increasing?
4. Is there a positive relationship between skilled and unskilled migration?
5. What makes brain drain more likely?
6. Does brain gain exist?
7. Do high-skilled workers remit, invest, and share knowledge back home? and
8. What do we know about the fiscal and production externalities of brain drain?

This paper is a product of the Finance and Private Sector Development Team, Development Research Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org.

Full paper (PDF 30pp)

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