Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: A Survey of Theoretical Predictions and Empirical Findings

By Somik V. Lall, H. Selod, Zmarak Shalizi. 2006

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The migration of labor from rural to urban areas is an important part of the urbanization process in developing countries. Even though it has been the focus of abundant research over the past five decades, some key policy questions have not found clear answers yet. To what extent is internal migration a desirable phenomenon and under what circumstances? Should governments intervene and, if so, with what types of interventions? What should be their policy objectives? To shed light on these important issues, the authors survey the existing theoretical models and their conflicting policy implications and discuss the policies that may be justified based on recent relevant empirical studies. A key limitation is that much of the empirical literature does not provide structural tests of the theoretical models, but only provides partial findings that can support or invalidate intuitions and in that sense, support or invalidate the policy implications of the models. The authors' broad assessment of the literature is that migration can be beneficial or at least be turned into a beneficial phenomenon so that in general migration restrictions are not desirable. They also identify some data issues and research topics which merit further investigation.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cb039bac448935eebbbe5470cfff9cbdcdff73e

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Citations in the corpus

Migration, Livelihood and Well-being: Evidence from Indian City Slums (2010, background): “Lall et al. (2006) synthesise the current state of”
Industrial Location in Developing Countries (2008, background): “Another is to look at migration flows, a subject that has received a good deal of attention in the development literature (Lall, Selod, and Shalizi 2006).”
Economic drivers of migration and climate change in LDCs (2011, background): “Lalonde and Topel (1997), Lucas (1997), Taylor and Martin (2001), Lall et al. (2006), and Rapoport and Docquier (2006).”
Viewpoint: From Cities to Productivity and Growth in Developing Countries (2008, unknown): “Although appealing, the Harris-Todaro argument can be criticised on a variety of grounds (see Lall et al. 2006, for an in-depth analysis and empirical references).”
Cities in Developing Countries: Fueled by Rural–Urban Migration, Lacking in Tenure Security, and Short of Affordable Housing (2015, background): “Malpezzi and Mayo (1997) and Bertaud and Malpezzi (2001) show how to produce such measures from detailed information on building regulations, while Brueckner and Sridhar (2012) measure the”
Urbanization’s effects on the urban-rural income gap in China: A meta-regression analysis (2020, background): “Second, while some scholars argue that URIG is an important driving factor of urbanization (Lall et al., 2006; Zeng and Zuo, 2013), we did not analyze the effect of URIG on urbanization due to limited empirical studies in the reverse direction.”