Urbanization and Development: A Spatial Framework of Rural-to-urban Migration

This paper relies upon some of the assumptions of the classical Alonso-Muth-Mills model in order to construct a spatial framework of rural-to-urban migration; specifically, it develops a spatial framework of migration where rural workers are uniformly distributed throughout a rural area, which it develops around a monocentric nuclear urban area. The spatial interactions between the rural and the urban areas are modeled via the two spatial variables of the rural rents and productivity spillover, whose effects of propagation from the urban to the rural area depend on the distance of the rural area from the urban area. From the model, it emerges how the rural rents affect the final levels of congestion in both the two areas, so that the urbanization level of the market solution can be inferior or superior with respect to the urbanization level set by the city planner. On the other hand, the inclusion of spatial variables does not seem to produce scenarios for urban growth which significantly differ from the ones detected in previous studies. Ultimately, these findings suggest the need for a city planner to design policies affecting the level of rural rents in order to modify the desired level of rural-to-urban migration, and hence the desired trade-off between urban growth and congestion.