Chapter 12 Internal migration in developed countries

This chapter describes the concept of migration, selected facts about internal migration in developed countries, and the determinants of migration. In most advanced societies, inter-regional migration is a major mechanism through which labor resources are redistributed geographically, in response to changing economic and demographic forces. The determinants of migration are the factors that affect migrationincluding characteristics both of places and of persons and their familieswhile consequences of migration refer both to the performance of migrants in their new locations relative to a benchmark, such as their presumed performance in their former place of residence had they not moved and to the impacts that migrants have on others in sending and receiving areas. The human capital model provides a powerful analytical tool for the study of numerous important issues in labor economics, but this model does not provide a comparably powerful explanation of migration.