Urban environmental quality and out-migration intentions
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Urban environmental quality and out‑migration intentions Jiří Balcar1 · Jan Šulák1 Received: 11 October 2019 / Accepted: 13 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Many large and industrial cities all around the world suffer from out-migration. It is usually connected with a loss of qualified labour force, suboptimal use of housing and city infrastructure, decrease in investments, etc., resulting in limited development potential. This article investigates the importance of urban environmental quality—especially pollution—for potential out-migration. In addition, it brings two innovative aspects to earlier studies on environmental migration: (a) exploring the influence of subjective perception of pollution, not only its objective level (corresponding to the theory of planned behaviour), (b) examining the different migration strategies instead of one binomial ‘stay or leave’ strategy. A representative sample of 3845 individuals from the city of Ostrava, Czech Republic (the third largest city in the country), which ranks among cities with the most polluted air in the Europe, was used for this purpose. The results suggest that (a) both the quality of natural environment and its subjective perception represent important and highly significant predictors of out-migration intentions, (b) different kinds of pollution lead to different migration strategies, (c) drain of young and educated workers is further strengthened by low quality of the natural environment. JEL Classification R23 · J61 · Q53 · D91 · C25
1 Introduction Out-migration represents a serious problem for towns and cities all over the world. It is connected with a loss of qualified labour force, decrease in consumption, suboptimal use of housing and city infrastructure, decrease in investments and many other negative effects (see e.g. Kühn and Liebmann 2012; Silverman et al. 2012; Moss Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s0016 8-020-01030-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jiří Balcar [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Sokolská třída 33, 702 00 Ostrava, Czech Republic
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Fig. 1 Air pollution in the Czech Republic. Source: CZHI (2016), authors. Note: Selected pollutants, usually with serious health effects, illustrate relative air quality in Ostrava. For information on other pollutants, such as PM10, N O2, SO2, O3, benzene and heavy metals, see CZHI (2016)
2008; Schilling and Logan 2008) resulting in a limited development potential, which can further strengthen the out-migration. Some large cities, such as Hong Kong (DeGolyer 2008) and Beijing (Anderlini 2013), report out-migration driven by environmental factors. Emerging empirical body on environmental migration suggests that pollution is a significant predictor for international and interregional migration flows (Šulák 2019; Li et al. 2017; Chen et al. 201
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