Rural-to-urban migration in developing economies: characterizing the role of the rural labor supply in the process of ur
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Rural‑to‑urban migration in developing economies: characterizing the role of the rural labor supply in the process of urban agglomeration and city growth Marco Baudino1 Received: 12 March 2019 / Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the literature on rural-to-urban migration in developing economies by shedding more light on the hitherto little-investigated linkage between the rural sector and the process of urban development. To this end, we combine existing spatial rural-to-urban migration frameworks and extend them by including some key assumptions of the urban development theory. Specifically, we construct a dynamic rural-to-urban migration model in which the links between the urban and rural areas are modeled using the spatial variables of rural land rents and an urban productivity spillover, in order to investigate the contribution of the rural labor supply to urban agglomeration and city growth. The results of our model indicate that rural land rents affect the optimal level of urban agglomeration in scenarios of both unplanned and planned migration, and that the city planner’s solution of optimal agglomeration may not necessarily be inferior to the market solution. In addition, we find that due to their impact on rural workers’ incomes, the spatial variables exert an influence on the steady-state level of growth to which the urban economy can converge. Our study bears policy implications, including the need for city planners to consider spatial variables in order to achieve the desired trade-off between city growth and urban agglomeration. JEL Classification R12 · R23 · J61 · O18
1 Introduction Rural-to-urban migration is seen widely as one of the major drivers of urban agglomeration and city growth in developing economies (Lee 2015; Brueckner and Lall 2015; Basu 2004). In this context, urban agglomeration dynamics sustained by * Marco Baudino marco.baudino@univ‑cotedazur.fr 1
CNRS, GREDEG, Université Côte d’Azur, 06905 Sophia Antipolis cedex, France
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the inflows of rural migrants has been considered in the literature as one of the main factors boosting the process of urban development, alongside drivers such as capital accumulation and quality of the institutions (Rodriguez-Pose and Zhang 2019; Jixiang et al. 2015; Henderson and Wang 2007; Henderson 2003; Black and Henderson 1999). Although several studies investigated the push and pull factors affecting migration mechanisms from rural to urban areas,1 as well as the characterization of both urban (Henderson et al. 2019; Bo 2019; DaMata 2007) and rural (Cui et al. 2019; Liu et al. 2018; Cheng et al. 2016) hierarchies, few analyses in the regional science literature have considered the connections between the rural sector and the process of urban development (Brueckner and Lall 2015; Ward and Brown 2009). Particularly, some of the more recent studies analyzing the impact of migration on the processes of urban agglomeration
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