How Does an Environmental Amenity Attract Voluntary Migrants? Evidence from Ambient Air Quality in China

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that air quality is an important amenity for population relocation in China. However, much of Chinese internal migration occurs due to non-discretionary reasons, such as government policies, family considerations, and military personnel reassignments. As such, estimates of the impact of environmental amenities on migration that do not control for migration reasons may be biased. Using the 2015 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this paper estimates the impact of ambient air pollution on voluntary migration to other provinces for work. We find that more polluted days (air quality index (AQI) >150) at the original residence leads to a significant increase in labor out-migration to a province with better air quality, providing evidence of the current migration trend leading to declining populations in China’s megacities. Our findings indicate that environmental migration is more favored among households that are less educated, are older, work overtime, and have lower income, suggesting that environmental migration may result from environmental health inequalities in socially disadvantaged families.

Optimal Residence: Does Air Quality Affect Settlement Decisions of Urban Floating Migrants?

“…In terms of the control variables, both individual-and city-level variables turn out to have significant impacts on floating migrants' willingness to settling in the destination city, and the estimates are basically in line with our expectations and findings of previous research [6,10,17,23,25,31].…”

“…Third, it is reliable as the survey is conducted by Chinese official authorities and covered mainland China. Fourth, much literature has used this database [17,23,[31][32][33][34].…”

“…The more years of education, the higher the level of education. In general, people who have received high education are more concerned about the environmental conditions and are more likely to stay in a city with good air quality [29,31].…”

“…In order to weaken the collinearity and heteroscedasticity of the model and reflect the income elasticity, we employ the logarithm of income as the proxy to conduct econometric analysis. The higher the income, the more sensitive to air pollution and the more likely to stay in the destination city with good air quality [23,29,31].…”