Climate-related hazards and internal migration empirical evidence for rural Vietnam

The main goal of this paper is to test whether different sorts of disasters are push factors of migration. The authors employ commune-level data from Vietnam to study whether three types of natural hazards have an impact on emigration figures. While droughts primarily cause temporary migration, flood events tend to induce permanent moves out of the affected regions. Whenever drought or flood events are perceived to have become more severe over the last decade, the authors found systematically higher emigration from the affected communes. Episodic typhoons or worsening typhoon trends remain without any significant effect in both the short- and the long-run.