Spatial labour mobility in a transition economy: Migration and commuting in Chile

Abstract

Spatial mobility is widely recognised as an integral component of national development. According to transition theory, as countries modernise and become globally connected, the intensity, forms and patterns of mobility evolve, reshaping activity networks and human settlement. Mobility transitions commonly occur over extended timeframes but can also be triggered by rapid transformations in the national context. Chile provides an ideal exemplar. Over the last four decades, it transitioned from a closed, centrally-planned economy with a socialist government to a globally integrated, market-driven system under military and democratic regimes. This has significantly transformed Chile's space economy. While prior research has explored particular facets of the mobility accompanying these shifts, no concerted attempt has been made to systematically trace the evolution of mobility in Chile and its connections to the socio-economic and political context.Chile provides a unique setting to explore these connections. It has a unique geography, settlement pattern and resource endowment; it displays levels of internal migration well above those in most parts of the world; and it has a small foreign-born population, so that unlike many other high mobility countries, internal mobility can be explored practically free from the complicating component of international migration. Chile also has the advantage of high quality migration data spanning the period in which the major socio-economic transition occurred.This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of labour mobility in Chile by exploring connections between various forms and dimensions of mobility and the sequence of changes experienced by the country during its transition to a market-driven economy. To this end, it considers internal migration and long-distance commuting between thirteen Chilean regions, and focuses on three key dimensions: their intensity, spatial patterns and composition.It also aims to determine the role of migration and commuting in meeting shifts in labour demand. These objectives are embedded in a temporal framework that traces the changing environment within which mobility unfolds and seeks to provide robust statistical evidence on its links with structural changes in the national context. The methodological framework blends mobility transition theory derived from Zelinsky (1971) with a suite of cutting-edge statistical techniques. To implement this framework, the thesis couples a carefully-constructed historical framework with a purpose-built database, assembled by harmonising data from three consecutive censuses (1982, 1992 and 2002), which provides five-year snapshots of migration covering the periods 1977-82, 1987-92 and 1997-02, together with data on commuting in 2002.As in Australia, the US and the UK, the analysis reveals that both the intensity and the spatial impact of labour migration in Chile declined over the period of analysis, with the most marked reduction occurring in the spatial impact of migratio...

Spatial interaction modelling: a manifesto

“…Additionally determining the relevance of factors shaping spatial flows based on multi-model inference offers an additional alternative to make inference in the context of SIMs and Big Data. Multi-model inference has been rarely applied to capture spatial interactions (Rowe 2013). Yet, it is widely used in biology and ecology, and various routines exist in R which can be integrated with simodels.…”

The CHilean Internal Migration (CHIM) database: Temporally consistent spatial data for the analysis of human mobility

“…Any alteration to boundaries directly compromises the comparability of migration statistics over time. Various changes affected municipal boundaries over the three censuses (Rowe 2013): between the 1982 census and 1992 census, 82 of out 335 municipalities underwent boundary shifts, affecting 2.2% of the total population and 247 thousand people; while between 1992 and 2002 censuses, only ten municipalities were affected -but these changes involved a much larger number of people (321 thousand), increasing the total number of municipalities from 335 in 1992 to 342 in 2002 due to the division of existing areas and creation of new municipalities.…”

“…This has transformed Chile's space economy. Prior work has systematically traced the evolution of mobility in Chile and its connections to the socio-economic and political context, revealing a declining trend in the intensity and redistributing capacity of internal migration (Rowe 2013).…”

Virtual special issue: Internal migration in times of COVID‐19

“…Relocating further away from jobs may imply longer commutes at least for a few days a week, increasing strain on local transport networks and potentially hacking national net zero targets (Mulholland et al, 2022). Moving to areas with limited housing supply may trigger a surge in house prices, promote gentrification and generate greater demand for local services (Rowe, 2013). Migration of young professional adults into rural and remote areas in relatively large numbers also promised to significantly alter the local population composition, slowing down ageing, raising local fertility levels and counterbalancing endemic patterns of population decline (Rodríguez-Vignoli & Rowe, 2018;Rowe et al, 2016).…”