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. 2024 Apr 10:12:1354071.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1354071. eCollection 2024.

Environmental health, economy, and amenities interactively drive migration patterns among China's older people

Hongjie Wang  1 , Xiaolu Gao  2 , Guili Liu  1 , Fuyuan Wang  3 , Mark W Rosenberg  4
Affiliations

Environmental health, economy, and amenities interactively drive migration patterns among China's older people

Hongjie Wang et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

The increasing number of older adult migrants is rapidly changing regional demographic and social structures in China. There is an urgent need to understand the spatial patterns and factors that influence older adults to migrate, especially the role of environmental health. However, this issue has been under-studied. This study focused on intra-provincial and inter-provincial older adult migrants as research subjects, estimated their spatial concentration index based on the iterative proportional fitting approach, and explored the factors influencing their migration using the GeoDetector Model. The results showed the following: (1) In 2015, more than 76% of inter-provincial older adult migrants were distributed in Eastern China, and most intra-provincial older adult migrants were scattered in sub-provincial cities. (2) Compared to factors relating to economy and amenities, environmental health by itself played a relatively weak role in the migration of older adults, but the interaction among environmental health, economy, and amenities was a key driving force of older adult migration. (3) There were significant differences in the dominant environmental health factors between inter-provincial migration and intra-provincial migration, which were temperature and altitude, respectively. Our findings can help policymakers focus on the composition of older adult migrants based on urban environmental health characteristics and rationally optimize older adult care facilities to promote supply-demand matching.

Keywords: China; environmental health; interaction; migration pattern; older people.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Spatial distribution of inter-provincial and intra-provincial older adult migrants based on the spatial concentration index in 2015.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Interaction among environmental health, economy, and amenities factors. (A) Economy. (B) Amenities.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was funded by A Project of an Emerging Interdisciplinary Platform for Beijing Studies.