Internal migration and urbanization: Are patterns changing? (2)

By using a longitudinal study of 300 households in Sichuan and Anhui, this paper aims to combine the discussions of initiation of migration, returned migrants, and circular migration together. By building multi-level regression models, I use event history analysis to show how children and parents impact migrants’ migration decisions overtime. When other factors are controlled, children’s age and parents’ health impact men and women’s migration status in different ways: when the increase of children’s ages generally increases the probability of starting migration for men, the change of the children’s ages only impacts women’s out-migration when all children reach the age of six – the age when children start primary school. Women tend to return to the villages when the children are 16 years old and still in school – the time when the children are preparing for senior high school entrance exam. When children of the household start going to college, both men and women’s migration probability significantly increases. When the parents report bad health issues, the women are very likely to return to villages, while men’s migration status usually do not change. The results show how migration works as a household strategy in China, and gender still decides the division of labor within a household.

During the last 60 years, the internal migration in Brazil were strongly related to the processes of urbanization and spatial redistribution of the population, marked by the intense population mobility and inserted in different stages of economic, social and political processes experienced by the Country during this period. From 1970, we assisted de launching of the more recent changes in the national migration process. After a long period of economic crisis, more severe in the 1980s and somehow held in 1990, Brazil enters in the ‘2000s with new perspectives on their economic dynamics and for this reason it require a new look at its internal migration. In the field of migration, it is true that a recovery in the economy, employment and poverty reduction should have effects on the volume and intensity of migration flows. The understanding of interregional migration in the last four decades incorporates the processes of in-migration, emigration and return migration marked by its specific historical features of “migratory complementary”. The return migration, although not a new phenomenon in national migratory history, was configured as a key element for understanding the long distance flow, especially those of Southeast to Northeast.

From a geographical perspective, these last decades, Spanish urban areas have constantly expanded. This urban sprawl has broken the traditional compact city model. However, from a demographic point of view, the picture is not as simple as Spanish urban areas have been through a series of growth and stagnation periods with significant spatial differences. This paper firstly intends to describe how the population of Spanish urban areas has increased this last forty years (1970-2011) and then to build, through cluster analysis, a spatial typology grouping urban areas which have similar growth trends. Finally, it analyzes, through factor analysis, the socio-economic causes behind the spatial patterns. 64 urban areas are incorporated to the study. In each of the cases, core city and periphery growth levels have been separately analyzed to enable the construction of an urban growth typology. Descriptive results show that two phenomena, suburbanization and foreign immigration, are the main drivers of a clearly defined spatial pattern in which highly-growing eastern urban areas would be clearly opposed to lower growing western ones. Preliminary analytical results demonstrate that this east-west divide would be manly caused by the deep differences in the economic/labor market structures of the respective urban areas.

This paper will identify the urbanization pattern in Indonesia by employing simple statistical methods to the readily available data of the 2000 and 2010 Indonesia Population Censuses, including percentage and rate of urban population growth. Urban localities (Desa Urban) are still largely concentrated on the island of Java, which may reflect the urban development disparity between Java and the outer islands, despite the fact that some outer island provinces have already experienced a high increase in the growth of urban localities and urban population. The peripheral of large cities experienced much more rapid annual population growth than the core of cities. Although urban population is still greatly concentrated in Java, there have been significant increase in the proportion of urban population in some provinces outside over the period 2000-2010. Nonetheless, small and and intermediate cities outside Java play a more important role as centers of socioeconomic activities compared to those in Java. In general, the recent pattern of Indonesia's urbanization reflects a continuity from the situation in 1990 and 2000, but at present some regions outside Java have began to undergo rapid increase in the urbanization level and urban population growth.