The Effects of Agricultural Income Shocks on Forced Migration: Evidence from Colombia

The forced migration literature has acknowledged violence as the main driver of internal displacement in the context of armed conflicts. Nonetheless, scant attention has been devoted to the role of income, a factor identified by the standard economic literature as the key driver of voluntary migration. This study aims to fill in this gap by investigating the impact of agricultural income shocks on the number of internally displaced persons fleeing from violence, in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. To address the possible endogeneity between forced migration and income, we use the standardized deviation of rainfall from its historic mean as an instrumental variable for municipal agricultural income. Our main results suggest that the elasticity of forced migration with respect to agricultural income shocks is unitary. This finding highlights the fact that forced migration is the result of a complex decision-making process where violence interacts with individual characteristics and environmental factors. Therefore, public policies aimed at reducing forced migration from rural to urban areas should develop comprehensive strategies that not only improve security conditions at the place of origin but also enhance agricultural productivity and provide access to risk-coping mechanisms for farmers.