Internal Migration In Industrialized Countries Research Paper

The determinants of migration are the factors that affect migration, including characteristics both of places and of persons and their families. The term refers to the qualitative and the quantitative importance of each factor. Place characteristics are specific to a given area, such as employment and wage opportunities, the presence of family and friends, and location-specific amenities. Personal and family characteristics help shape individual and family responses to opportunities that may exist at different locations. The consequences of migration refer both to the performance of migrants in their new locations relative to a benchmark (their presumed performance in their former place) and to the impacts that migrants have on others in sending and receiving areas. Traditionally, research has addressed several questions:

(a) Who migrates?

(b) Why do these people migrate?

(c) Where are the migrants coming from and where are they going?

(d ) When do they migrate?

(e) What consequences result from migration?

Many studies have aimed primarily at describing migration.

1. What Is Migration?

The United Nations manual, Methods of Measuring Internal Migration (1970), has served as the basis for several definitions of migration and migrants. It proposes the following ( p. 2):

A migration is defined as a move from one migration-defining area to another (or a move of some specified minimum distance) that was made during a given migration interval and that involved a change of residence. A migrant is a person who has changed his usual place of residence from one migration-defining area to another (or who moved some specified minimum distance) at least once during the migration interval.

2. Comparing Internal Migration Rates In Industrialized Countries

In most countries people migrate from one place to another in pursuit of increased utility resulting from better employment opportunities, higher wages, and many other factors, but international comparisons of internal migration rates are difficult to make for several reasons.

Various countries define migrants differently in terms of whose movement is being considered, in terms of the type of border they must cross, and in terms of the interval over which the movement occurs. The method of measuring migration differs widely.

In some countries, censuses are the main source of information concerning migration, whereas in others, population registers and other types of administrative records are the major source.

The size and shape of the spatial areas between which migration is measured are not uniform either within or between countries.

Migration propensities are sensitive to national economic and demographic conditions, and consequently interregional migration propensities could differ for behavioral reasons.

The most unambiguous method of making cross-national comparisons is to focus on residential moves, but residential mobility includes more than what is commonly regarded as migration. Nevertheless, such measures suggest that rates of mobility vary widely across industrialized countries. Movement rates are high for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. A second group of industrialized countries that is far behind these four includes France, the UK, Israel, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. Belgium, Ireland, and The Netherlands have the lowest rates of residential mobility.

3. The Determinants And Consequences Of Migration—Overview

3.1 Migration Patterns

Many factors contribute to the decision to migrate. Differential characteristics of sending and receiving regions provide a potential incentive for moving, and individual and/or family traits help condition the responses to utility differentials that may arise from these different characteristics. An individual’s personal characteristics—including accumulated job skills, general labor market conditions, and employment composition—will help determine the probability of gaining employment during a period of job search. Conditions in land and housing markets also may be important, and state and local taxes and the associated availability of public goods may be critical for certain potential migrants.

A number of lifecycle considerations—such as marriage, divorce, completion of schooling, entry into the labor force, start of a career, birth, aging, leaving home of children, home ownership, and retirement—are critical in an individual’s or a family’s decision to migrate. Other personal circumstances, often related to the lifecycle, are also important, such as employment status, earnings, education, accumulated skills, age, job tenure, sex, and health.

One of the most universal mobility relationships is that between age and migration. Migration propensities peak during the early to mid-20s and then decline steadily, with a slight upturn at retirement age in some countries. For example, in the USA during the 1980s a person aged 25–29 with four years of college education was over twice as likely to make an interstate move as his or her counterpart aged 35–44; over three times more likely to make such a move than someone with comparable education aged 45–64; and over three times more likely to make such a move than a peer in age who had less than eight years of education.

Studies of the determinants of migration commonly have been formulated in the context of individual utility maximization, with some attention given to the family or the household as the decision-making unit. Models based upon such behavioral foundations have frequently been estimated with aggregate data relating both to migrants and to the determinants of migration. Before the general availability of micro and longitudinal data, virtually all applied migration research was of necessity based on aggregate data. Although aggregate data were and are limiting in many respects, they did not prevent a boom in migration research during the 1960s and 1970s. Even in the presence of many microdata sets, aggregate data are frequently studied today. Not only are aggregate trends and tendencies of interest in their own right, but for many countries, such aggregate data are all that is available.

During the 1960s, the main thrust of migration research began to take on a more formal tone. Most of the research was not formal in a theoretical sense, but rather intuitively generated hypotheses at first were tested formally in an econometric sense with aggregate data, typically but not always with place-to-place migration data. Such models were frequently specified in the context of modified gravity models. The models are ‘gravity type’ in that migration is hypothesized to be directly related to the size of relevant origin and destination populations, and inversely related to distance. The models are ‘modified’ in the sense that the variables of the basic gravity model are given behavioral content, and additional variables that are expected to influence migration are included in the estimated relationship. These studies showed clearly that migration diminishes rapidly with increased distance and that migration is greater between more populous regions, but migration did not always appear to be from low to high wage regions nor from those with high unemployment rates to those with low rates.

3.2 Theoretical Perspectives On Migration

In almost all migration research conducted by economists prior to the late 1970s, the theoretical perspective taken was that of a disequilibrium system. The perspective is called ‘disequilibrium’ because migration is assumed to be driven by the existence of a set of non-market clearing regional wages. Spatial variations in wages or earnings are assumed to reflect opportunities for utility gains. During more recent years, this disequilibrium perspective has been challenged by proponents of the equilibrium hypothesis, which assumes that spatial variations in wages are compensating and therefore do not reflect opportunities for utility gains.

According to the human capital approach, the potential migrant will select the locality at which the real value of the expected net benefit that accrues to him from migration is greatest. The income that the individual expects to earn at each alternative destination enters importantly into his judgment concerning the benefits associated with each location. The relevant income measure for the individual to consider is the present discounted value of his expected future stream of net pecuniary returns.

Due in part to the fairly consistent tendency for empirical studies based on aggregate data to fail to confirm the importance of wages or income in migration decisions, the equilibrium approach has been offered as an alternative to the traditional disequilibrium perspective described above. The equilibrium theorists begin by assuming that households and firms are in proximate equilibrium at any point in time. This assumption means that the marginal household and firm, while maximizing utility and profit, respectively, are spatially arrayed so as to receive zero consumer and producer surplus from their location. Thus, any movement from the general equilibrium configuration cannot improve utility or profit.

According to the equilibrium approach, changes in lifecycle factors or generally rising real incomes continuously change the demand for consumer amenities. Because amenities are not evenly distributed spatially, migration occurs and quickly reequilibrates households. Net in-migration to amenity-rich areas tends to drive down wages and drive up the prices of locally produced goods and services and land. In amenitypoor areas, opposite patterns of change occur. Wages and local prices diverge across regions until they just compensate households for the differing amenity bundles that the various regions supply.

Family ties result in negative personal externalities that are usually internalized by the family and thus tend to discourage migration. ‘Tied persons’ in the family are ‘those whose gains from migration are (in absolute value) dominated by gains (or losses) of the spouse’ (Mincer 1978, p. 753). Presuming that their joint net returns on migrating from i to j exceed their joint net costs of migrating, a couple would presumably migrate from i to j. If, for example, the wife’s expected earnings in j were less than in i, but the husband’s were sufficiently greater in j than in i to offset these losses, the wife would be a ‘tied mover.’ On the other hand, if the husband’s earnings gain in j were to fail to offset his wife’s earnings loss in i, the couple would remain in i, and the husband would be a ‘tied stayer.’ Moreover, according to Mincer, such ties tend to reduce the employment and earnings of those wives who do migrate and to increase the employment and earnings of their husbands. Mincer goes on to show that increased labor force participation rates of women cause an increase in migration ties, which results in both less migration and more marital instability. Increased marital instability in turn encourages migration as well as increased women’s labor force participation.

3.3 Consequences Of Migration

The consequences of migration have been addressed at two levels. The first deals with the migrants themselves,

where the emphasis has been on the benefits to migrating, often measured in terms of earnings gains. The second deals with migration’s impact on others in the origin and the destination. Do migrants depress local wages in receiving areas and displace local residents from jobs? To the extent that migrants tend to be young and well-educated, does migration deprive source regions of critically needed human capital that ensures these regions of long periods of economic stagnation?

4. Conclusions

4.1 Pressing Questions

Who migrates? Why do they migrate? Where do the migrants come from and where do they go? When do they migrate? What consequences does migration have for the migrants themselves and others in origin and destination regions? During the last 30 years, firm answers have been provided to many of these questions, but at the same time new, narrower, and in certain ways more refined, interesting, and certainly more challenging questions have arisen.

Migration propensities appear to vary considerably across industrialized countries for reasons that are not always obvious. Moreover, estimated parameters that address the questions raised above, while generally in qualitative agreement, are quantitatively somewhat different across industrialized countries, even when the models and data are roughly comparable. With regard to internal migration, rigorous cross-national studies are virtually nonexistent, but differences in geographic size (and hence spatial distribution of economic opportunities) and culture are likely to importantly underlie observed differences.

4.2 The Human Capital Model

Until about 20 years ago, aggregate data were used almost exclusively to study various migration phenomena. Such data embody a number of shortcomings that prevented the study of many important issues bearing on migration. The relatively recent availability of micro-and longitudinal data have had a major impact on four areas of migration research.

(a) Such data have gone far toward clearing up earlier puzzles concerning the relationship between unemployment and migration.

(b) They have allowed the human capital model to be tested in the migration context by allowing the estimation of migrant earnings equations.

(c) They have permitted a clarification of the relationship between personal characteristics and the decision to migrate, and they have allowed a deeper understanding of the relationship between various lifecycle and familial factors and migration.

(d ) They have permitted a detailed focus on different types of migrants, particularly primary, return, and other repeat migrants.

Researchers now know that local unemployment in the USA has a significant influence on the migration decisions of the unemployed and those who are seeking new jobs, but has little influence on individuals who are secure in their jobs. However, they do not know why this relationship fails to hold for European countries. Moreover, they do not know with great confidence why some unemployed individuals are quicker to migrate than others. To some extent, immediate migration could be discouraged if a person’s spouse remains employed. What characteristics of a spouse’s employment discourage migration? To what extent does it matter whether the party remaining employed is the husband/or the wife? What role does the availability of unemployment insurance play in discouraging immediate migration? Institutional settings differ substantially by country, such as in the nature of unemployment insurance programs, and could cause differences in the response to personal unemployment.

The human capital model has provided a powerful analytical tool for the study of numerous important issues. It is somewhat surprising that this model has not typically provided a comparably powerful explanation of internal migration. Whether migrants are compared to otherwise comparable individuals in the origin or the destination, they appear to suffer earnings losses for at least several years after migration. This finding has been verified repeatedly for the USA and for other countries. Although several explanations have been offered for these findings, we still do not know enough about why they occur. The most likely explanation for the apparent failure of the human capital model is that the model has not failed, but rather it has just not been properly or fully implimented.

4.3 Lifecycle Impacts On Migration

The influences of lifecycle changes on migration decisions have only barely been touched by researchers. The relationships between many such changes and migration therefore have remained undiscovered. Completion of education; birth and aging of children and the anticipation of these events; changing marital status and especially divorce; death of a spouse; acquisition of a home; retirement—these are only a few potentially important lifecycle changes that are likely to importantly affect migration in industrialized countries and about which much remains to be learned.

Little is known about the interactions between migration and fertility in the contemporary USA or in other industrialized countries. A sizable literature on this topic began developing in the 1930s, but was mainly focused on rural-to-urban migration. A good deal of more recent work has also focused on rural-to-urban migrants in less developed nations, and a few studies concentrate on immigrants to the USA. However, in spite of the availability of more and better data in recent years, little has been done to study how the act of migration affects fertility in the USA or in other industrialized countries.

4.4 Migration Policies

Migration serves an equilibrating function in the economy, expediting the balancing of demand and supply forces within and across regions, and thus facilitating the operation of market economies. This facilitating role of migration has attracted the attention of policy makers. In a number of European countries, such as the UK, France, and The Netherlands, migration policy has been tied directly to regional development policy; in others, such as Sweden, migration policy has been oriented toward improving the efficiency of the labor market. In either case, a major objective has been to reduce unemployment. Subsidization of relocation expenses and employment information exchanges are the most common forms that migration policy has taken in Europe.

In the USA, policy concerns regarding migration generally are passive, although this was not the case during the nineteenth century. These concerns have been directed toward both how various national, state, and local policies have affected in- or out-migration and how migration has affected the public sector of states and localities. One policy concern that has arisen in this respect is whether the jobs created by economic development efforts go to previous residents or inward migrants.

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