Conflicts and natural disasters as drivers of forced migrations in a gravity-type approach

The literature identifies three main drivers for forced migration, namely conflict, food nsecurity, and natural and man-made disasters, although finds no empirical consensus on the association between climate change and migrations. Aim of this study is to identify the different push and pull factors of forced migration in different regions of the world by means of gravity-type models. Particular attention is devoted to determining the effects of climatic factors and conflicts, while controlling for the economic, political and social relationship between the origin and the destination countries. We model both total forced migration, that includes refugees, asylum seekers, internal displacements, and returnees, and cross-border forced migrations. Finally, we consider a full panel data analysis and estimate both fixed effects and random effects model specifications. The former offers interesting insights when looking at the most significant country pair fixed effects, that after controlling for all the different drivers, represents the migration routes whose intrinsic characteristics are most relevant for explaining forced migrations. The latter, on the other hand, allows estimating also the effect of time-constant bilateral predictors such as the distance between countries or the fact that they share a common language or have a colonial relation.