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The impacts of migrants on environmental degradation in developing countries

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Abstract

The prolonged issue of environmental degradation, especially in developing countries, has urgently called for a solution by first identifying the source of the problem. Poverty has been identified as among the core cause of environmental degradation. But we also foresee the prospect of migrations from poor countries as an additional force that leads to the worsening of environmental deterioration. Empirically, this paper investigates the effect of migration on the environmental deterioration of 29 developing countries for the period between 1980 and 2019. Adopting the panel cointegration approach, the paper finds evidence that deterioration seems to be higher in countries with a higher level of migration. Although the results could be undesirable to the host countries, the best and win–win solution could be achieved by the government of the host countries, either with or without the assistance of the United Nations, to introduce more assistance to support their life and educate their citizens to be more environmentally savvy.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. When high income is highlighted, in this study, we also stress that all factors that have a connection with income (or GDP in macro study) such as industrialization, urbanization, and deforestation are all embedded or factorized in the income itself. Hence, to conserve space, these three factors will not be discussed in this study.

  2. Prior to this point, alongside income, other several determinants have also been identified such as FDI (Acharyya 2009; Mukhopadhyay 2006; Pao and Tsai 2011; Smarzynska and Wei 2001), and energy consumption (Pao and Tsai 2011; Ren et al. 2014; Shahbaz et al. 2015; Tamazian and Rao 2010).

  3. Issue could refer to either on ‘how to assist them’ or ‘what would be their implication on host country’.

  4. Some studies such as Warner et al. (2010), and Oliver‐Smith (2012), on the other hand, examine the effect of environmental degradation on migrations.

  5. We plan to apply any hypothesis or theory which supports the linkage between migration and environmental degradation. Unfortunately, we could not find any single hypothesis to refer to. At best, as reflected in limited literature available about the topic, some past studies argue on the types of activities that might be done by the migrated people who may be harmful to the environment in order to justify the link between the two. The detail is available in the literature section but hardly we can term it as the theory for the time being. Although the model does not start with migration-environment theory, this approach is still acceptable and common in modelling.

  6. We plan to apply any hypothesis or theory which supports the linkage between migration and environmental degradation. Unfortunately, we could not find any single hypothesis to refer to. At best, as reflected in limited literature available about the topic, some past studies argue on the types of activities that might be done by the migrated people who may be harmful to the environment in order to justify the link between the two. The detail is available in the literature section but hardly we can term it as a theory for the time being. Although the model does not start with migration-environment theory, this approach is still acceptable and common in modelling.

  7. The null hypothesis for IPS also implies auxiliary assumptions regarding the individual effects, especially, αi = 0 for all i = 1, …, N.

  8. Please refer to Pedroni (2004) and Banerjee and Carrion-silvestre (2011) for more details and other options.

  9. Ignorance and illiteracy about environment could also be the explanations.

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Acknowledgements

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Funding

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, UTM Fundamental Research (UTMFR) (Grant No: Q.J130000.3855.21H98).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Johor Bahru, Malaysia

    Yogeeswari Subramaniam & Nanthakumar Loganathan

  2. School of Management, Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Malaysia

    Tajul Ariffin Masron

Authors
  1. Yogeeswari Subramaniam
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  2. Tajul Ariffin Masron
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  3. Nanthakumar Loganathan
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Correspondence to Yogeeswari Subramaniam.

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Handling Editor: Luiz Duczmal.

Appendix

Appendix

(See Table 7).

Table 7 Cross-section dependence test
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Subramaniam, Y., Masron, T.A. & Loganathan, N. The impacts of migrants on environmental degradation in developing countries. Environ Ecol Stat 30, 17–40 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-022-00552-5

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