Economic Motives and Barriers to Internal Migration1

A literature review and fresh evidence are presented on economic motives for migration and barriers to moving. Given urban income opportunities, higher rural incomes are shown to deter decisions to move from countryside to town. Rural-urban migrants enjoy substantial gains on average, though selection into migration is estimated to be negative on unobserved traits and skills. Those who do not move forego substantial, potential gains. Ethnolinguistic minorities, those living at greater distances from cities, and the socially disadvantaged with lower levels of schooling forego the most. Thus, very real barriers to migrating arise for these populations, though it remains unclear to what extent the constraints are financial, discomfort with the prospects of urban life, or concern to be near kith and kin. However, the amount of potential gain to nonmigrants does not decline at higher income levels of countries, suggesting financial barriers may not be paramount.

Not All About Farming: Understanding Aspirations Can Challenge Assumptions About Rural Development

Rural development is a political topic in which debate has been more focussed on externally identified needs than on demands or aspirations of the rural population and polarised between the attractions of urban income earning opportunities and the importance of rural farming communities for national food provision. The heterogeneity of local aspirations and their implications for development have barely been considered. We explore the aspirations of residents of three contrasting regions in Kenya that vary in their agricultural and off-farm potential. We argue that opportunities are a major framing influence on aspirations but there is important, and routinely overlooked, diversity within the communities which could inform future options for effective development. We outline how development initiatives could be redesigned to align more closely with aspirations. However, aspirations are a complex concept and, while our approach offered novel insights, these would be enriched when combined with household survey data.

Reducing the Rural-Urban Social Inequality: Chinese and Russian Comparative Experience

Rural-urban social inequality in Russia is evident. Russian public opinion proposes to reduce the rural-urban income gap, both within the framework of the self-regulating market paradigm, reflected in public programmes, and within the planned command economy framework. In the same ways it proposes to achieve an inter-regional socio-economic balance.The People’s Republic of China (PRC) also faces the problem of reducing rural-urban social inequality. It looks as if it is trying to solve the problem by applying direct measures that can even reverse the processes of urbanization.This article proposes to analyze and adopt the most effective ways of reducing rural-urban inequality, as practiced in China. It is also possible to incorporate in the Chinese state’s management of social processes the methods of reduction of inequality between rural and urban populations, created by the dirigiste trends of Russian public thought, since the socio-economic system of the PRC readily assimilates elements of the planned economy.

Rural - urban income gap and labour market in Romania

Rural – urban income gap is an important social-economic development indicator for a society. A large rural - urban income gap within a society reveals a split of it into two distinct societies, one extremely poor compared to the other. In Romania, almost half of the resident population lives in rural areas (46.02% in 2019), while the urban-rural migration flow is higher than the traditional reverse flow since 1997. However, the country is characterized by regional economic disparities, Bucharest-Ilfov region being the most economically developed. Labour market in rural areas is underdeveloped, rural population being highly depended on subsistence agriculture. Furthermore, rural areas have a low level of income and living standards. In this paper, we analysis the rural-urban labour market dynamics and rural-urban income gap using a LMDI (logarithmic mean Divisia index) decomposition for 2005-2019 period. Factors such as income gap effect and structural rural income effect are considered. Results show that the total urban–rural income gap has decreased with 8.91%, while structural rural income effect contributed with an increase of only 0.63%, the income gap effect (of different employed population groups) being of -9.49%.