Do People Migrate Due to Climate Change? A Comparative Analysis for Romania and Poland

Nowadays people from all over the world have to face climate change. This issue can take different forms like changes in temperatures, sea level increases or natural disasters (floods, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami, heat waves). Throughout this paper we test the impact of climate change (proxied by the level of precipitations) on international migration from Romania and Poland to the main destinations from the European Union by testing the gravity model of migration. Due to the fact that both countries taken into consideration are exposed to extreme weather events like floods, it is important to find out how people deal with these problems. They adapt locally or migrate abroad? Policymakers need to know how people react to climate change because they have to develop specific adaptation policies. One significant novelty in our study is that we consider new and up-to-date reasons for migrating abroad from Romania and Poland. In this way we fill the gap on this topic related to Romania and Poland as origin countries. By applying a Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood Estimator on a balanced panel database for the 2001-2018 time period we have found that Romanian people are more prone to emigrate because of climate reasons rather than Polish people.

JEL classification:F22, Q59, C23.