UrbanizationandRuralUrbanMigrationTheoryandPolicy.pdf

Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration: Theory and Policy3117.1 The Migration and Urbanization DilemmaIn this chapter, we focus on one of the most complex and nuanced dilemmas of the development process: the phenomenon of massive and historically un- precedented movements of people from the rural countryside to the burgeon- ing cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Chapter 6, we documented the extraordinary increase in world and especially developing-country popula- tion over the past few decades. By 2050, world population is expected to ex- ceed 9 billion people, and nowhere will population growth be more dramatic than in the cities of the developing world. Indeed, according to United Na- tions estimates, the world became more urban than rural in 2008, for the first time in human history. After reviewing trends and prospects for overall urban population growth, we examine in this chapter the potential role of cities—both the modern sector and the urban informal sector—in fostering economic development. We then turn to a well-known theoretical model of rural-urban labor transfer in the context of rapid growth and high urban unemployment. In the final section, we evaluate various policy options that governments in developing countries may wish to pursue in their attempts to moderate the heavy flow of rural-to- urban migration and to ameliorate the serious unemployment problems that continue to plague their crowded cities. This chapter’s case study looks at pat- terns of migration in India and Botswana.Cities will increasingly become the main players in the global economy. —Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations and Nobel laureate for PeaceBy fostering economic growth, urbanization helped reduce absolute poverty in the aggregate but did little for urban poverty. —Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, and Prem Sangraula, 20087312PART TWOProblems and Policies: DomesticUrbanization: Trends and ProjectionsThe positive association between urbanization and per capita income is one of the most obvious and striking “stylized facts” of the development process. Generally, the more developed the country, measured by per capita income, the greater the share of population living in urban areas. Figure 7.1 shows urbanization versus GNI per capita; the highest-income countries, such as Denmark, are also among the most urbanized, while the very poorest coun- tries, such as Rwanda, are among the least urbanized. At the same time, while individual countries become more urbanized as they develop, today’s poorest countries are far more urbanized than today’s developed countries were when they were at a comparable level of development, as measured by income per capita, and on average developing countries are urbanizing at a faster rate. Figure 7.2 shows urbanization over time and across income levels over the quarter century from 1970 to 1995. Each line segment represents the trajectory of one country, starting from the solid dots, which represent the 1970 income and urbanization level for a given country and ending at the end of the line segments (marked by a diamond), which represent the corresponding 1995 income and ur- banization level for the same country. Although the World Bank caption to the figure stated that “urbanization is closely associated with economic growth,” the figure may also be interpreted as showing that urbanization is occurring every- where, at high and low levels of income and whether growth is positive or nega- tive. Even when the lines point to the left, indicating shrinking incomes per capita over the period, they still generally point upward, indicating that urban- ization continued. In short, urbanization is happening everywhere in the world, although at differing rates. So we need to consider urbanization carefully—is it only correlated with economic development, or is causation also at work? Indeed, one of the most significant of all modern demographic phenomena is the rapid growth of cities in developing countries. In 1950, some 275 million50,00040,00030,00020,00010,000020406080100GNI per capita (U.S. $)LuxembourgSwitzerlandDenmarkIreland SpainRwandaUrban population (% of total population)Source: UN-Habitat, “State of the World’s Cities, 2001,” http://www.unchs.org/ Istanbul+5/86.pdf. Reprinted with permission.FIGURE 7.1Urban Population and Per Capita Income across Selected Countries313CHAPTER 7Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migrationpeople were living in cities in the developing world, 38% of the 724 million total urban population, by 2010, the world’s urban population had surpassed 3.4 billion, with over three-quarters of all urban dwellers living in metropoli- tan areas of low- and middle-income countries. While in a significant number of cases the speed at which the share of ur- ban population has increased in developing countries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is not much faster than in many of the devel- oped countries when they were urbanizing in 。