Migration unemployment and development: a two-sector analysis.

TLDR

Rural‑urban migration remains widespread in developing countries even though agriculture offers positive returns and urban unemployment is high, a pattern that conventional economic models struggle to explain. The study develops a two‑sector migration model that incorporates a politically set minimum urban wage above agricultural wages. The model treats migration as driven by expected earnings gaps, with the urban employment rate acting as an equilibrating force, and represents the economy as a two‑sector internal trade system where rural labor can be fully employed or partially transferred to urban manufacturing. The analysis shows that a politically set high minimum wage makes rural‑urban migration rational even with urban unemployment, and that conventional policies such as wage subsidies or hiring can worsen unemployment, suggesting that optimal policy requires partial subsidies or hiring combined with migration restrictions.

Abstract

This study examines why rural-urban labor migration persists and is even increasing in many developing nations despite the existence of positive marginal products in agriculture and significant levels of urban unemployment. Conventional economic models have difficulty reconciling rational behavioral explanations with growing levels of urban unemployment in the absence of absolute labor redundancy in the overall economy. This paper formulates a 2-sector model of rural-urban migration which recognizes the existence of a politically determined minimum urban wage at levels substantially higher than agricultural earnings. The distinguishing feature of the model is that migration proceeds in response to urban-rural differences in expected earnings with the urban employment rate acting as an equilibrating force on such migration. The overall model is used to demonstrate 1) that given the politically determined high minimum wage the continued existence of rural-urban migration in spite of substantial urban unemployment represents an economically rational choice on the part of the individual migrants and 2) that economists standard policy recommendation of generating urban employment opportunities through the use of shadow prices implemented by means of wage subsidies or direct government hiring may lead to a worsening of the urban unemployment problem. Welfare implications of alternative policies associated with various programs to retain rural population are assessed under the assumption that the full wage flexibility suggested by economic theory is politically unfeasible; it is concluded that in the absence of wage flexibility an optimal policy would include both partial wage subsidies or direct government employment and measures to restrict free migration. The basic model is a 2-sector internal trade model with unemployment the 2 sectors being the permanent urban sector which specializes in production of manufactured goods and the rural which either uses all available labor to produce agricultural goods or exports part of the labor to the urban sector. It is assumed that the typical migrant retains his ties to the rural sector but the assumption is not necessary for the argument.