Urban-Rural Gaps in the Developing World: Does Internal Migration Offer Opportunities?
By David Lagakos. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2020
209 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article provides an overview of the growing literature on urban-rural gaps in the developing world. I begin with recent evidence on the size of the gaps as measured by consumption, income, and wages, and argue that the gaps are real rather than just nominal. I then discuss the role of sorting more able workers into urban areas and review an array of recent evidence on outcomes from rural-urban migration. Overall, migrants do experience substantial gains on average, though smaller than suggested by the cross-sectional gaps. I conclude that future work should help further explore the frictions—in particular, information, financial, and in land markets—that hold back rural-urban migration and may help explain the persistence of urban-rural gaps.
Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb4c93a42b0f591d2188ad3a49b659eac626f04d
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In Safety Research
In Sociology and Political Science
In Urban Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature (2021, background): “There will be greater gains from lowering migration costs if those with high potential benefits from migration are those who are stuck in rural areas because they happen to face even higher costs (Lagakos, 2020).”