Unemployment, rural-urban migration and environmental regulation

Rural-urban migration, urban unemployment and underemployment, and job-search activity in LDCs.

A quantity adjustment framework is used to analyze unemployment and underemployment in less developed countries (LDCs). The basic premise of the formal theoretical model presented is that the same kinds of forces that explain the choices of workers between the rural and urban sectors can also explain thier choices between 1 labor market and another within an urban area and are most likely made...

Urbanization, Rural–urban Migration and Urban Poverty

Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration

This chapter considers the literature on urbanization and migration to cities from rural areas in developing and middle-income countries. The chapter assesses recent patterns, discusses traditional models, addresses more recent models of migration, presents some of the recent findings from the micro-econometric literature, and closes with a discussion of the role of cities in economic growth. C...

Heterogeneous Firms and Rural-urban Migration Heterogeneous Firms and Rural-urban Migration

We construct a general equilibrium model of urban unemployment with a continuum of heterogeneous urban firms producing differentiated products in a monopolistic competitive market. We show that an increase in urban institutionally fixed minimum wage reduces urban aggregate output and each urban firm will experience an output cut proportional to the change in aggregate output. However, such prop...

Life Earnings and Rural-Urban Migration

This paper is a theoretical study of rural-urban migration—urbanization—as it has occurred in many low-income economies in the postwar period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional, land-intensive technology to a human capital–intensive technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can accum...