Metropolitan Migration in Developed Countries: A Cross-National Data Base

Cross-national studies have mushroomed in the field of demography over the past two decades. Yet there have been some surprising omissions. One of these, until recently, has been a lack of comparative work on internal migration leading to big city population changes in the world's developed countries of North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. The reason for this void does not lie with a lack of interest on the part of academics or policymakers who witnessed unforeseen city declines and counterurbanization during the 1970s -representing important dislocations in long-standing trends (Champion, 1989). Rather, the lack of comparative research on this topic stemmed from almost impossible complexities arising from the incomparability of urban or metropolitan definitions across countries, and the lack of uniformity in the ways internal migration data are collected among the world's developed countries. It was into this minefield that I began to tread with a small research staff at the University of Michigan in the early 1980s. Our mission was twofold: