While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations. Using an 18-year panel of...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations. Using an 18-year panel of...

This paper examines the impact of agrarian structures on the migration behavior and destination of rural household heads and individuals in Kenya. To explore the complexity of migration we extend the standard Harris-Todaro framework to account for land inequality and size. In addition, we...

Climate change exacerbates desertification forcing millions of rural people to urbanize, especially in developing countries. Our quantitative analysis across African countries highlights migrants’ two typical sequential moves: i) people escape from villages to cities; ii) through cities’...

Internal migration plays an important role in the economic development of individuals, their families, and their country. This study describes Mozambique's most common migration patterns from 1992 until 2017 using data from three population censuses. We focus on the most important moves between...

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

This paper considers two major issues that need to be treated as matters of urgency. First, internal (within country) migrations in the Asian (ACI) region are mostly undocumented and large. It is shown there are significant differences in wages and human development measures to which migrants...

This paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in Indonesia. We exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure. Our estimates reveal...

We use novel linked employer–employee data to study the relationship between globalization and formal sector interstate migration for Brazil. We estimate the worker’s multichoice migration problem and document that previously unobserved employer covariates are significant predictors...