Essays in Migration and Land Use Change PDF Download

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Languages : en
Pages : 138

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This dissertation is a collection of three essays in migration and land use change in developing countries. In general, my dissertation falls into two categories. The first one concerns the effects of household migration, where I analyze the effects of migration on the development of migrant-sending communities. The second one focuses on analyzing land use change as a result of different policies such as tax incentives, land tenure and emigration policies. The first chapter explores whether internal rural-urban migration crowds out informal risk sharing networks and reduces the extent of informal consumption insurance in migrant-sending villages using instrumental variables and fixed effect regression approach. Evidences show that internal migration decreases the extent of risk sharing network in rural Thai villages. The second chapter, coauthored with Jennifer Alix-Garcia and Annemarie Schneider, examines the effects of a series of tax incentive policies implemented between 1980 and 2000 resulted in changes in the growth trajectories of the targeted cities in China. Our findings show that policies implemented early tend to have large and persistent effects on urban expansion, while later policies tend to only have effects on places with export-advantageous location. The third paper focuses on how international migration affects agricultural land abandonment and housing investment in Romania after the collapse of communism. The empirical results show that international migration in 2000s leads to agricultural land abandonment and rural households prefer investing in housing.

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Languages : en
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Author: Hannah L. Randolph
Publisher:
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Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Urbanization and migration are widespread phenomena in developing countries. While urbanization creates gains for many, the process of urban expansion also adversely affects rural or peri-urban households that lose land or are displaced by land expropriation. Similarly, the absence of migrants creates deficits in left-behind children that are offset by remittances, but the process of decision-making about the use of remittances is not well-understood. This dissertation estimates the welfare effects of land expropriation on rural Chinese households, explores Chinese household responses to expropriation, and examines the dynamics of household decision-making over the use of remittances in Indonesia. The first essay addresses the welfare effects of land expropriation in China and household responses to being expropriated. Over the past twenty years, the Chinese government has pushed to expand cities and develop peri-urban areas. As part of this effort, the government has expropriated an average of 1,600 km2 annually. The impact of this urban development strategy on the welfare of expropriated households is not well-established. I estimate the causal relationship between expropriation and livelihood choice, earned income, and other welfare outcomes, relying on panel data to observe how outcomes change in response to an expropriation event. Controlling for baseline outcomes, I find that expropriation reduces agricultural activities but does not increase other employment or income generation, thus threatening household food security. In certain cases, government compensation offsets these effects. I also find suggestive evidence that temporarily sending a migrant worker may be an effective response to expropriation, while relocation is generally not. These findings suggest concrete policies the government can undertake to lessen the negative welfare impacts of urban development on expropriated households: higher compensation, development of non-agricultural labor markets, food assistance, and loans for temporary migration. The second essay explores the process of household decision-making about remittances in the context of Indonesian sending households. The new economics of labor migration literature emphasizes strategic motives for remitting money, but little is known about how migrants influence household decision-making, or how that influence affects younger household members. Migrants may use this influence to induce greater inputs into child quality through bargaining, or affect younger members' behavior through role model or psychological health effects; this influence is expected to affect school enrollment, performance, and labor force participation of younger household members. This paper estimates the extent to which communication between migrants and households affects the probability that household members 10-22 are in the labor force. Using instrumental variable analysis of cross-sectional household survey data from Indonesia, I find evidence that greater communication between migrants and households reduces the probability that members 10-22 work by 33-35 percentage points. I also find evidence to suggest that characteristics of the household member that makes decisions about remittances play an important role. My findings are inconsistent with a bargaining framework, but may be explained by role model or psychological health effects. These results support the idea that migrant exert influence over the use of remittances, and suggest some important avenues for further research into the dynamics of sending household decision-making.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309096553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Population, Land Use, and Environment: Research Directions offers recommendations for future research to improve understanding of how changes in human populations affect the natural environment by means of changes in land use, such as deforestation, urban development, and development of coastal zones. It also features a set of state-of-the-art papers by leading researchers that analyze population-land useenvironment relationships in urban and rural settings in developed and underdeveloped countries and that show how remote sensing and other observational methods are being applied to these issues. This book will serve as a resource for researchers, research funders, and students.

Author: Philip F. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131799504X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Rural life in Southeast Asia is being transformed by new and intensifying processes of migration and mobility. Migration out of rural areas creates new forms of class mobility, familial relations, production processes and income. Migration into rural areas creates a new and sometimes marginalized workforce, contestation over resource access, and the juxtaposition of culturally different groups. At the same time, everyday mobility stretches the spatial boundaries of village and family life. The bounded space of the village is no longer adequate to understand the dynamics that are driving (and resulting from) rural social change. This collection of original studies explores the cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of intensifying migration and mobility in rural Southeast Asia at multiple scales. Diverse processes are explored including rural-urban flows, rural-rural movement, everyday mobilities, and international migrations into regional and global labour markets. Drawing on fieldwork in six countries across the region, these essays also explore what migration means for our understanding of class, citizenship, gender and the state in a rapidly changing part of the world. This book was based on two parts of a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

Author: Eric F. Lambin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540322027
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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This book presents recent estimates on the rate of change of major land classes. Aggregated globally, multiple impacts of local land changes are shown to significantly affect central aspects of Earth System functioning. The book offers innovative developments and applications in the fields of modeling and scenario construction. Conclusions are also drawn about the most pressing implications for the design of appropriate intervention policies.

Author: Frank Laczko
Publisher: UN
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Gradual and sudden environmental changes are resulting in substantial human movement and displacement, and the scale of such flows, both internal and cross-border, is expected to rise with unprecedented impacts on lives and livelihoods. Despite the potential challenge, there has been a lack of strategic thinking about this policy area partly due to a lack of data and empirical research on this topic. Adequately planning for and managing environmentallyinduced migration will be critical for human security. The papers in this volume were first presented at the Research Workshop on Migration and the Environment: Developing a Global Research Agenda held in Munich, Germany in April 2008. One of the key objectives on the Munich workshop was to address the need for more sound empirical research and identify priority areas of research for policy makers in the field of migration and the environment.

Author: Cory B. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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This thesis comprises three essays on the role of land use in economic development over the long run. As is natural for many theses, "development" here is defined in a range of ways. The first essay considers the long-run effects of historical land concentration on agricultural investment and productivity in the frontier United States. The second essay considers how disruptions to agriculture in the US South, in the form of the boll weevil pest, changed the political economy of the Jim Crow South. The final essay considers the long run in the future, using agronomic microdata to assess the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. The first chapter provides new evidence on the old question of how concentrating land into the hands of large landlords affects economic development. Despite their popularization as bastions of pioneer equality, America’s frontier regions often exhibited highly concentrated patterns of land ownership. A patchwork of policies opened some areas to large-scale farming by absentee landlords but reserved others for settlement by small farmers. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of the frontier United States using quasi-random variation in these allocation procedures. I collect a large database of modern property tax valuations and show that historical land concentration had persistent effects over a span of 150 years: lowering investment by 23%, overall property value by 4.4%, and population by 8%. I argue that landlords' use of sharecropping raised the costs of investment, a static inefficiency that persisted due to land market frictions. I find little evidence for other explanations, including elite capture of political systems. I use my empirical estimates to evaluate counterfactual policies, applying recent advances in combinatorial optimization to show that an optimal property rights allocation would have increased my sample’s agricultural land values by $28 billion (4.8%) in 2017. The second chapter, joint with James Feigenbaum and Soumyajit Mazumder, studies the role of Hirschman’s threat of "exit" in the Great Migration in the Jim Crow South. How do coercive societies respond to negative economic shocks? Since before the nation's founding, cotton cultivation formed the politics and institutions in the South, including the development of slavery, the lack of democratic institutions, and intergroup relations between whites and blacks. We leverage the natural experiment generated by the boll weevil infestation from 1892-1922, which disrupted cotton production in the region. Panel difference-in-differences results provide evidence that Southern society became less violent and repressive in response to this shock with fewer lynchings and less Confederate monument construction. Cross-sectional results leveraging spatial variation in the infestation and historical cotton specialization show that affected counties had less KKK activity, higher non-white voter registration, and were less likely to experience contentious politics in the form of protests during the 1960s. To assess mechanisms, we show that the reductions in coercion were responses to African American out-migration. Even in a context of antidemocratic institutions, ordinary people can retain political power through the ability to "vote with their feet." The third chapter, joint with Arnaud Costinot and Dave Donaldson, looks at the long run effects of climate change on agricultural productivity and land use. A large agronomic literature models the implications of climate change for a variety of crops and locations around the world. The goal of the present paper is to quantify the macro-level consequences of these micro-level shocks. Using an extremely rich micro-level dataset that contains information about the productivity--both before and after climate change--of each of 10 crops for each of 1.7 million fields covering the surface of the Earth, we find that the impact of climate change on these agricultural markets would amount to a 0.26% reduction in global GDP when trade and production patterns are allowed to adjust.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309048389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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This valuable book summarizes recent research by experts from both the natural and social sciences on the effects of population growth on land use. It is a useful introduction to a field in which little quantitative research has been conducted and in which there is a great deal of public controversy. The book includes case studies of African, Asian, and Latin American countries that demonstrate the varied effects of population growth on land use. Several general chapters address the following timely questions: What is meant by land use change? Why are ecological research and population studies so different? What are the implications for sustainable growth in agricultural production? Although much work remains to be done in quantifying the causal connections between demographic and land use changes, this book provides important insights into those connections, and it should stimulate more work in this area.

Author: Wenchao Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Amenity migration
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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It is essential to study the relationship between environmental features and human land-use activities that can provide a better understanding of human-environment interactions. In a response, this dissertation addresses the human-environment issues from different perspectives in three essays. The first essay conducts an integrated analysis to investigate the impacts of human activities and environmental features on wildfire occurrence at the Wildland-Urban Interface in a changing climate. We focus on the impacts of land use changes as measured by their density, connectivity, and mix. The conceptual model builds on a theoretical framework developed by Woodward (1987) and Neilson (1995) that characterizes the functioning mechanism of ecosystems. The empirical models identify the key factors that influence wildfires. Hypotheses are tested to demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of human land-use impacts on wildfires. Results can inform the design of policies that aim to identify community vulnerabilities, reduce wildfire uncertainties, strengthen firewise community development, and inform future land-use decision making in response to wildfire threats. The second essay analyzes the impacts of wildfire risk on urban development. It builds on and expands the monocentric-city framework developed by Wu (2006) and Wu (2010) by introducing wildfire risk into this model. We calibrate the model and examine the urban spatial profiles changes under different assumptions of wildfire risks and natural amenities. We find that wildfire risk can take on various aspects of urban spatial profiles at a much broad scale that go beyond the fire-prone areas and affects both households and public decision sectors. Even without inconsistency in fire-zone designation policy, over-development can occur in fire-hazardous area. The third essay models the role of amenity in interregional migration and spatial distribution of economic activities. Extending the new economic geography model of Helpman (1998) by including locational amenities, we present a multi-market equilibrium framework that includes consumption, production, and trade. Results suggest that the effects of amenities are significantly affected by household preferences, trade barriers, and other regional economic characteristics. This study contributes to the amenity-driven migration literatures and informs the debate about the effect of amenities on interregional migrations and regional economic development.