When Distance Drives Destination, Towns Can Stimulate Development

Abstract

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 individuals from this region and information on the possible destinations from the census, this study documents, through dyadic regressions and controlling for individual heterogeneity, how the deterrence of further distance to cities (compared to towns) largely trumps the attraction from their promise of greater wealth, making towns more appealing destinations. Education mitigates these effects (lesser deterrence from distance; greater attraction from wealth), while poverty reduces the attraction of wealth, consistent with the notion of urban sorting. With about two thirds of the rural population in low-income countries living within two hours from a town, these findings underscore the importance of vibrant towns for inclusive development.When distance drives destination, towns can stimulate development *

Rural Employment in Africa: Trends and Challenges

“…Their cohorts are also fewer in numbers, which partially explains the smaller number of migrants to cities compared to the number of migrants to towns (or other rural areas). Recent evidence suggests, however, that in migrants' destination choice the deterring effects of distance far outweigh the attraction of higher wages and incomes at destination even though less so for the more educated and richer (De Weerdt et al 2021). 9 Given their proximity and the type of economic activities, secondary urban centers are more accessible and provide more employment opportunities for the lower skilled and those with liquidity constraints.…”

Rural underemployment and urbanization: Insights from a nine year household panel survey from Malawi

“…Between 2010 and 2015, 12 new agglomerations emerged. New urban agglomeration have, in addition to the population size effect, also an effect on distance: for each new urban town that arises, the average rural dweller will be in closer proximity to an urban center, enhancing various rural-urban linkages (De Weerdt et al, 2021). To get an idea of the relative importance of the growth of existing urban agglomerations against the emergence of new agglomerations, we can split the change in urban access in two components: the growth stemming from the 'older' agglomerations-those 19 agglomerations that already existed before 2000-and the growth stemming from the 58 new agglomerations that only emerged after 2000.…”

“…All of these linkages will depend not only on the extent of urban growth, but also on the distance between the rural and the urban area (De Weerdt, Christiaensen, & Kanbur, 2021;Lucas, 2001;Soto et al, 2018).…”

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“…Chau, 1997;Munshi, 2003), industry and occupational connections (e.g. Chen and Rosenthal, 2008), border e↵ects (Wilson 2021) in addition to distance considerations (Manning and Petrongolo, 2017;De Weerdt et al, 2021).…”