Labor migration

Andrew  Leonard posts in his blog an interesting report from journalist Tony Cheng of Al-Jazeera:

China has banned, for environmental reasons, the free hand-out of plastic bags.  As a result, the country’s largest plastic bag factory has closed, throwing 20,000 workers out on the street.  Some see this as posing a dilemma between environment and economy, but I don’t agree that good environmental policies are bad for the economy, just the opposite.  What this case illustrates instead is the dilemma between doing something good for the whole people, but at the expense of adjustment costs borne by a small group – the 20,000 workers and the factory owner. 

Last week the World Bank hosted a workshop on the social dimension of climate change, a good chance for insights from the dark side of the moon. Not only environment, not only the economic implications of mitigating greenhouse gases, but people affected, the poors' right to their lands and to natural resources. Many studies were presented. One rang my bell.

A whole session was dedicated to the role that climate change impacts and disasters may have on conflicts and migration in developing countries. These are some of the previous statements that called attention the most:

According to the Bank's recently published Migration and Remittances Factbook, the Top 10 remittance recipients in East Asia & Pacific in 2007 were: China ($25.7 bn), Philippines ($17.0 bn), Indonesia ($6.0 bn), Vietnam ($5.0 bn), Thailand ($1.7 bn), Malaysia ($1.7 bn), Cambodia ($0.3 bn), Mongolia ($0.2 bn), Fiji ($0.2 bn), Myanmar ($0.1 bn).