Lipton. Rural Development and The Retention of The Rural Population in The Countryside of Developing Countries

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Rural Development and the

Retention of the Rural Population
in the Countryside of Developing
Countries
a
Michael Lipton
a
Institute for Development Studies University of Sussex ,
England
Published online: 24 Feb 2011.
To cite this article: Michael Lipton (1982) Rural Development and the Retention of
the Rural Population in the Countryside of Developing Countries, Canadian Journal of
Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 3:1, 11-37, DOI:
10.1080/02255189.1982.9670018
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Rural Development and the Retention of the Rural
Population in the Countryside of Developing Countries"
MICHAELLIPTON
Institute for Development Studies
University of Sussex, England.
ABSTRACT
The article addresses jive central issues. First, it argues that the
rate of rural migration is smaller than usually believed. Second, it shows

that migrants normally gain from voluntary migration while losers are
found principally among the urban populations that the migrants join.
Third, the article explains that townward migration deprives the rural
hinterland of dynamic young leaders, congests cities and leads to the
inefficient and inequitable allocation of national resources. Fourth, rural-
urban inequality is viewed as the most promosing target for corrective
actions in order to curb townward migration. Fifth, the article discusses
how policy towards the urban - rural balance should be affected given
the special difficulties facing the L.D.C.s on the 1980s.
R~SUME
L'article discute essentiellement cinq problPmes. 1 . Le volume de mi-
gration rurale. Celui-ci est conside're' comme plus re'duit, moins important
que l'estimation habituelle. 2. Les gagnants et les perdants lors de migra-
tions volontaires. Les migrants gagnent ge'ne'ralement suite 2 leur migra-
tion. La ve'ritable pauvreth se rencontre plut6t parmi les populations urbai-
nes plus anciennes. 3 . La migration rurale doit constituer une cause de
souci. Elle enlPve aux campagnes leurs jeunes leaders dynamiques, con-
gestionne les villes et favorise l'allocation ine'gale et inefjicace des res-
sources nationales. 4. L'ine'galite' rurale-urbaine est conside're'e comme le
facteur qui pourra Ctre le plus aise'ment influence' ajin de diminuer la mi-
gration vers les villes. 5 . L'article discute comment les politiques
concernant les migrations rurales seront affecte'es par les difjiculte's que
confronteront les P.V.D. au cours des anne'es 1980.
* This paper is not identical with the verbal text of the public address. None of the
statements in either three necessarily reflects the views of the Institute of Development
Studies, Sussex University, or the World Bank. I am grateful to Mr. A. Churchill and Dr.
0. Stak for valuable comments on an earlier draft.
12 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
Politicians, civil servants, businessmen and scholars alike seek to un-

derstand why people move from countryside to city. AU hope to predict
how many will do so in future. Yet, in many parts of the world,
we know little about past or current rates of rural-urban migration - let
alone its duration, causes or consequences.
This is because many figures for “urban growth” do not distinguish
properly among four things : natural increase of initial urban populations ;
nef immigration from rural or other urban places (or abroad) ; the natural
increase of the new immigrants themselves ; and “graduation” (or boundary
expansion) that cause new places to be counted as urban. Statistical
explanations or predictions or urban growth, since they seldom separate
these four elements, are usually mechanistic and unrealiable. Even the
initial figures, on which such statistical models are constructed, are often
- especially in Africa - controversial to the point of randomness. Inter-
national comparisons are especially dangerous, because “urban” means
different things in different countries : typically census authorities in Africa

and Latin America count places as “urban” when the population exceeds
2000 or so, but in Asia the borderline is more usually 5000.
It is necessary to obtain much greater clarity on these statistical
questions, which are basic to any sensible policies affecting migration,
and we need to understand migration as a process reflecting preferences
and conditions at the level of the individual migrant, of his household and
family of origin, and perhaps above all of his membership in, and relation
to, kin-groups and social classes in two local communities: of origin
and of destination. Useful explanations of various sorts of migration will, in
my judgement, indeed require statistical generalizations ; but they will be
about types of families, of villages, or of squatter settlements. Although
reliable national-level data on migration are needed for policy choices,
their assemblage into cross-country correlations, or intra-country time-
series, lump together so many different sorts of migrant, motive, duration,
and outcome that they can help little in explaining migration. The degree
of explanation of different types or speeds or degrees of migration, achieved
by such methods, is normally the type of explanation is usually
A very sophisticated discussion of the problem is UNITEDNATIONS,Patterns of
Urban and Rural Population Growth, Population Studies No. 68, New York, 1980. Never-
theless, pp. 9-17 use cross-country regressions of urban-rural growth-rate differences (URGDs)
- reflecting and conflating all four elements ! - upon initial urban proportions of popu-
lation, modified only by giving some weight to “the most recently observed URGD for a
country” (p. 11) - to predict urban and rural populations to the year 2000. ‘Urban’ and
‘rural’ are defined by each country’s own criteria. See also N. EBERSTADT, “Recent declines
in fertility in less developed countries”, World Development, 8, 1 , Jan. 1980, pp. 39-40, on
selective underenumeration.
EBERSTADT, p. 39; and see below, fn. 14.
United Nations, pp. 121-3. Some but not all, World Bank data sources stand-
ardize on a border line of 20,000.
For example, United Nations, p. 10, writes (my italics) of the procedures des-
cribed in fn. 2 above: “The coefficient of correlation between [URGD and initial urban
proportion] is -0.280. Hence it was considered desirable to incorporate this relationship
into the urban projections”. Since (-0.280)2 = 0.784, the relationship associates only 7.8%
of variances in URGD with variance in initial urban proposition.
RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE RETENTION OF RURAL POPULATION 13
ambiguous and superficial, and often misleading. Local-level analyses,
and ultimately statistica1 comparisons based on them, offer the only chance
of understanding the process of migration.
I1
Among the many questions we must address, I should like to focus

attention on five central issues : the quantity of rural-urban migration ;
the gainers and losers ; “why worry” ; how to alter the flows ; and how to
adapt the answers to L.D.C.’s special problems in the 1980s. The five issues
are central both to any coherent theory of migration, and to understanding
the problems facing the beneficiaries and the victims of urban growth.
I’ll briefly introduce all five issues, before giving a little more detail on
each of them.
First cames the issue of quantity - the only issue on which national
data can (or could if improved) offer much help. How much migration
from the countryside is there, and how much will there be? Can it be
classified, so as to pinpoint its past and likely future contribution to urban
growth? How much urban growth has been, and will be, caused by true,
net rural-to-urban migration? Rates of urbanisation, particularly in the
largest metropoli are all increasing at an alarming rate”.6 I shall argue that,
in fact, true net rural-urban migration is much smaller than is usually
believed; is, indeed, not large in the poorer L.D.C.s, either by histo-
rical or by current DC standards ; does little to transfer really poor people
to towns; and is subject to various forces, demographic and economic,
tending to reduce it still further. Most current urban population projections
are- implausibly high.
Second comes the question of gainers and losers. Here, the study of
development has exhibited one of its many vast, pendular swings of fashion.
Ten years ago, many researchers believed that the migrants themselves
lost from townward migration -that they tended to move towards poverty,
unemployment, or membership of the urban informal sector. This extreme
view, based largely on Asian and African experience, has given way to
the opposite extreme, based largely on research in less-poor squatter areas
of Latin America. According to the new conventional wisdom, there is ’
This is partly because of cross-country methods, differing national definitions of
‘urban’, and conflating of growth sources (fn. 1); partly, too, because most estimation
procedures, like the U.N.’s, “imply that the urban proportion would reach unity if projected
far enough into the future”, i.e. not
even asymptotically (United Nations, p. 11).
IINSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT A N D CO-OPERATION, “XI lth Inter-
national Conference : Introduction”, mimeo, Ottawa, April 14, 1981, p. 1 .
For a powerful statement, based (unusually) on West African experience, see P.
LLOYD,Slums of Hope?, London: Penguin Books, 1979. See also the papers in World
Development, 6, 9-10, Sept.-Oct., 1978, ed. R. BROMLEY, and R. MOHANand N. HARTLINE,
‘The Poor of Bogota: Who they are, what they do, and where they live’, World Bank
Urban and Regional Report, No. 80-6, Washington, D.C., 1980.
only a very small overlap among any two of the following four groups
of persons : recent rural-to-urban migrants ; the urban poor ; urban informal
workers ; and the urban unemployed or underemployed. While this view is
an exaggeration - especially in Asia and Africa - the fact remains
that urbanising migrants usually (a) voluntarily choose migration, (b)
learn of it from experienced relatives, and therefore (c) can be rea-
sonably assumed to make rational decisions - especially as they are
usually more educated than the villagers they leave behind, and the urban-
rural income gap is far higher for the educated than the uneducated.9
Migrants normally gain from voluntary migration ; possible losers must be
sought among those left behind, or among the urban populations that the
migrants join.
This brings us to the third question : why worry about rural-to-urban
migration? “It can be stated with certainty [ofJ this urbanisation ... that its
consequences are disastrous, both qualitatively and quantitatively”. l o Yet
its scale turns out to be surprisingly small, and it results from rational
choice; so how can we be so certain in predicting disaster? If, as is
generally agreed, medium-term development is (and should be) almost
always accompanied by a rise in the share of workers engaged in industry;
and if much industrial activity involves genuine economies of scale and/or
agglomeration;” then why get upset if workers urbanise? Here, it will be
necessary to enquire whether intra-rural and intra-urban efficiency and’
equity - and, perhaps above all, the efficiency and equity of- resource
allocation between city and country-side - are helped or harmed by the
human flows (rather small, and individually often rational) that do take
place. Partly because it is so often “the best and the brightest” who go
to the city - largely because village existence has been rendered unat-
tractive by policy biases induced by, and in favor of, townspeople, in-
cluding previous migrants - quite small townward flows of migrants turn
out to involve other people in much potential damage: damage to the
rural hinterland deprived of dynamic young leaders ; damage to the increas-
ingly congested urban centres ; and damage, especially, to the efficient
and equitable allocation of resources between them. It must, however,
be stressed that this has to be offset against benefits to migrants, and often
to their families, that are usually correctly perceived before the “big step”
of migration is taken.
J . CONNELL, B. DASGUPTA, R. LAISHLEY and M. LIFTON,Migration from Rural

Areas :The Evidence from Villages Studies, Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 59-61.
CONNELL et al. , pp. 61-5.
l o INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND CO-OPERATION, p. 2: Con-
ference on Rural Development and Retention of Rural Population in the Countryside of the
Developed Countries, October 29-31, 1981.
UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 38-9, suggests these scale-economies may apply even to
some social costs ; but the usually turn into diseconomies above some critical city size (M.
LIFTON,Why Poor People Stay Poor, Harvard and Temple Smith, 1977, p. 229), and may
be obtained by imposing external costs on smaller places.
The fourth question, if we are by now worried about rural-urban
migration, is how to change allocations, or incentives, or socio-economic
structures, so that migrant flows will be (a) on balance reduced and or
(b) improved in their total impact, especially their external effects on non-
migrants. This leads to two issues. What causes various sorts of townward
flow - and, in particular, are “excessive” flows due to over-high (actual
or anticipated) gaps between rural and urban income, or to inequalities
within the rural sector itself? And what sorts of causes can best be tackled
by policy - i.e. what sorts of townward migration are best modified, and
by what means? (“Best” here signifies - within the constraints of the
politically feasible - some combination of economically cost-effective,
socially equitable and humanly decent.) Thus the fourth question (“how
to influence townward migration in the desired way’) involves analysing
both “what causes migration” and “how can those causes best be affected.”
The double-sided nature of the problem crucially affects our analysis. For
example, it may well be that inequality within the rural sector is more
important cause of excessive townward migration even than rural-urban
inequality - yet also that rural-urban inequality is nevertheless a more
promising target for corrective actions.
The fifth question takes us from migration theory to closely independ-
ing policy applications. How should policy towards the urban-
rural balance of affected by the special difJiculries facing the Third World
in 1980s? North-South capital flows are being privatised, and their terms
are becoming more onerous, l 2 well before machinery for adequate OPEC-
South flows is in place. Northern recession, and perhaps protectionism,
will retard Southern export growth. And the pure Ricardian rental cost
of fossil-fuel energy will increasingly constrain many types of Third World
development. At least pending a new “green revolution”, l 3 most L.D.C.s’
growth will therefore continue to be slow. Do the interests of L.D.C.s’
urban and rural populations alike require us to view the 1980s as a period
to be survived : a time for “reculer pour mieux sauter”? Would both rural
and urban communities, in very poor nations in the 1980s, be best served
by subsistence-maintaining packages, heavily downplaying the develop-
ment of long-run integrated rural-urban markets and flows ? With export
demand (and modem growth) sluggish and liable to sharp reversals,
should came poor countries temporarily look to the dynamic possibilities
of secure subsistence? If so, how will migration be influenced?
l 2 In the late 1960s, aid comprised over two-thuds of Third World debt; now it is
under one-third (O.E.C.D. (D.A.C.), Development Co-operurion, Pans, 1975, 1980). More-
over, the terms of official flows are hardening, concessional components (as with the IDA/
IBRD ratio) are eroding, and fixed interest-rates are becoming more onerous as World Variable
rates - and perhaps inflation rates - decline.
l 3 Even if more fossil-fuel-intensive than ‘older’ agriculture, scientific farming is less
so than most industry, so that “a new green revolution” should restructures output in fossil-
fuel-saving ways, rendering faster growth feasible.
I11
Many factors affect the way in which figures about urban populations
are presented. It isn’t just that the basic data are often weak - so weak
that, for example, two careful and objective studies (in 1980) differed by
over 40% in their estimates of the 1975 population of the two largest cities
in Ghana.14 The real problem is that the errors are not random. For
whatever reasons, almost every aspect of the quantitative importance of
towns in the life of developing countries tends to be substantially exagger-
ated by the way the population and migration data are presented.
First, urban proportions in total Third World populations are over-
stated. This is mainly because many countries use a very low borderline
- 2500, 2000 or even less - between urban and rural communities.*S

This means that many small and peaceful farming villages are lumped in
with the great cities for analysis and projection.
Second, the growth of urban share is overstated. This happens mainly
because communities, “graduating” across the arbitrary rural-urban bor-
derline due to natural population increase, get reclassified as urban. l6
This takes place even if nothing is happening to change the economic
levels, activities or behaviour of their people. l7
Third, the share of urban growth due to migration in developing
countries is overstated, typically by 25-35 percent. This is partly because
everything not due to natural increase tends to be lumped together as due
to migration. One major result is the neglect of “graduation”. The over-
statement of the role of migration is due also to the neglect of expanding
urban boundaries, l 9 and of the interplay between natural increase and
migration in towns. 2 o In fact, migration plus reclassification contribute a
smaller share of urban growth in poor countries than in rich ones - about
l 4 K. C. ZACHARIAH and J. C O N D Migration

~, in West Africa :Demographic Aspects,
Oxford, for World Bank-OECD, 1981, p. 80, gives Accra in 1975 as 729,000, Kumasi as
314,000; UNITEDNATIONS,p. 127, give 1,050,000 and 447,000 respectively. For Dakar,
however, the World Bank gives 760,000 and the U.N. 685,000.
UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 121-3.
l6 UNITED NATIONS, pp. 25-6; LIPTON,p. 225.
l 7 Note the almost universal, and often large, rise in the proportion of agriculturally
employed persons living in “urban” places in developing countries - and the falling ratio
between the probability of industrial work in urban areas and that in rural areas. UNITED
NATIONS, pp. 74, 77.
Typically responsible for 20-35% of the “urban” growth, by constant (national)
definitions, that is not due to natural increase - and thus often attributed to migration.
UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 25-6.
l9 UNITED NATIONS, p. 26; LIFTON,pp. 225-6.
*O The “share of urban growth attributable to natural increase” usually means the
share due to natural increase of initially resident population. Natural increase in newly-
resident migrant streams is entirely, and in most contexts confusingly, attributed to migra-
tion and not to natural increase.
40% as against 60%.21Indeed, the proportion of city growth due to mi-
gration is falling in most poor countries.22In recent decades, it has been
smaller than in rich countries. 23
The really poor countries’ urban growth, especially the share due to
migration, is not dramatic by historical standards either. In the 25 years
from 1875 to 1900, the now-rich countries roughly doubled their populations
living in places with over 5000 inhabitants ; only about 18 % of this was due
to natural increase. 24 In the 25 years from 1950 to 1975, India also roughly
doubled the population in places of over 5000 (actually up 114%); and
about 70% of the rise was done to natural increase.25 In China, growth
of such areas was even slower, and the part of it due to migration even
smaller. 26
The misperceptions are especially serious for two reasons. First, they
greatly overstress the extent to which we perceive poverty as urban. This
is because the overstatements of Third World urban size, share, growth,
and immigration are not equally serious in all developing countries. The
overstatements are especially extreme if applied to the great masses of
really poor people in big, poor lands of Asia and Africa. One can indeed
find not-so-poor nations, especially small ones, in Latin America and West
Asia where urban size, growth, and immigration have increased really dra-
matically. Data for such cases are then, all too often, averaged - without
appropriate weighting - with data for very big, very poor nations, and
estimates, based essentially on migration in small middle-income countries,
are then applied on a world scale. 27 Of the 3.4 billion people in developing
countries in 1981, some 2.4 billion - all in Asia and Africa - lived in
really poor countries (GNP below $375 per person in 1979).28 Of these
- the world’s really resource-starved people - three in four live in China
or India.29 In China, about 13 percent of people lived in urban areas
in 1953 - and about the same proportion lived in the same urban areas
21 UNITEDNATIONS,p. 25.
22 UNITEDNATIONS,pp. 25-6.
23 UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 25-6. Comprehensive confirmation that Third World urban
proportions, growth, and migration-induced shares are indeed all rather modest appears in
an extremely valuable paper by S. PRESTON,“Urban growth in developing countries: a
demographic reappraisal”, Population and Development Review, 5 , 2, June 1979, which I
saw only after completing this paper.
24 J. V. GRAUMAN, “Orders of magnitude of the world’s urban population in history”,
UN Population Bulletin, 8, 1976, p. 32.
25 UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 24, 26.
26 WORLDBANK,China : Socialist Economic Development, Annex B, Washington,
D.C., 1981, pp. 47-9.

27 For example, the “estimated percentages of growth attributable to international
migration and reclassification” in 1960-70 for continents, developing areas, etc. (UNITED
NATIONS,pp. 24-25) appear to be averages of all countries unweighted by population. The
30% of India’s urban growth, so attributed, thus counts for no more than the 50% of S n
Lanka’s - although India’s population is almost fifty times larger than Sri Lanka’s.
28 WORLD BANK, World Development Report 1981, Washington, D.C., August
1981, Annex Tables 1, 17.
29 WORLDBANK,WDR 1981, Annex Tables 1 , 17.
in 1979, implying very slow net migration to towns. 30 In India, in the thirty
years since 1951, the urban proportion of the population has grown slowly
- from 17 percent to 22 percent - and probably one-quarter even if
that is due to reclassification of rural places as urban.31 In 1961 (and
probably 1981), barely 4 per cent of Indians were village-born towns-
people (many not permanent migrants), and even these are partly offset
by 1 percent who are town-born villagers. 32
Second, all this over-aggregation and overstatement of really poor
nations’ level and pace of urbanisation - leading laymen to ‘infer’ from
the places graduating above 2,000 inhabitants between censuses in small
and not-too-poor Latin American countries to “India’s urban future” !33 -
leads us, not merely to allocate exaggerated shares of scarce human energy
and concern (and aid and investment) to megalopolis, but to project our
exaggerations into the future. In 1975, there were 17 cities in less-developed
countries - low-income plus middle-income - with over 4 million persons.
They contained 4.26% of these countries’ populations. In the really poor

places, Africa (1.60%) and South Asia (3.13%), the proportions were even
smaller. Even cities of 2 million and above contained only 2.7% of Africa’s
people, and 4.8% of South Asia’s, in 1975.34 As for the “explosion”
of this tiny yet powerful urban base, the number of big cities had indeed
swollen as smaller cities graduated, but the population of each big city
had seldom much outpaced that of other urban, or even sometimes rural,
(Where it had, as in Seoul, rapid expansion was usually linked
to rapid growth, and economic transition :36 a source of major problems
certainly, but not an urban crisis.)
The 3 % of Africans, and 5 % of South Asians, in cities of over 2
million persons already control disproportionate shares of their countries’
wealth and resources. To exaggerate their present importance is not help-
ful. 37
Still more unfortunate is the projection of that role into the future,
and the allocation of even more excess resources accordingly. Most “urban
population projections” are overstated, partly due to a built-in assumption
that the urban proportion of every nation’s population will eventually reach
unity. The projections are then constrained to fit that assumption. More-
over, forecasts of urban population change - combining, as they do,
natural increase, net migration and reclassification - are normally based
30 See source cited at fn. 26 for discussion of data base.

UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 26, 161.
)* A. BOSE,“Migration streams in India”, in International Union for the Scientific
Study of Population, Papers and Proceedings of the Sydney Conference, 1967, pp. 598-9,
602-5.
33 R. TURNER (ed.), India’s Urban Future, Berkeley : University of California, 1962,
is of course a very valuable collection, despite its outrageous title.
34 UNITED NATIONS, pp. 11, 49, 51.
35 UNITED NATIONS, pp. 49-51, 55, and Table 48.
3 6 UNITED NATIONS, Table 48.
37 UNITED NATIONS, p. 1 1 .
on weak predictive equations of very low degrees of statistical signifi-
cance. 38
Above all, there is no role for human action in these urban popula-
tion projections. We well know that increasing urban inflows - especially
if heavily biased towards young men, as in most of Asia and Africa -
can reduce urban rates of natural increase. 39 Also, rapid past urban growth
generates varied, increasing external costs (not least to potential future
migrants) 40 and thus curtails future urban growth. Hence, throughout 195 1-
71, population in the Calcutta urban agglomeration - that huge, poor
animal which superficial observers see as one day eating up all India -
actually grew more slowly than the rural population of the surrounding
State. 4 1 Nevertheless Calcutta’s population, having grown by only 55% in
those twenty years, is officially projected to grow by 89% in 1980-2000.42
Apart from other tendencies to overstate trends, no allowance is made
in such projections for the probability that increasing proportions of urban
populations will be in older age-groups where, as in Bombay, net rural-to-

urban migration is negative. 43
Rural-to-urban migration is massively important. But the reason is
emphatically not that it has contributed, or will contribute, to urban popu-
lation explosions justifying even more resource diversion, of investment or
skills or subsidies by really poor nations towards the small proportions
of their people living in towns and especially in giant cities. Indeed, such
resource diversions - while in no way justifled by the exaggerations and
over-projections now current - could intensify rural neglect, and thus ac-
tually cause the urban population explosions that they are supposed
to cure.
IV
Who gains from townward migration? Who loses? We know a good

deal about the answer within rural areas ; something, within towns ; and we
know something, but seem to care remarkably little, about the balance
of gain and loss between country and town.
Most potential migrants - or their families - soon learn to assess
urban vis-a-vis rural options : the probabilities of working or studying
38 UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 10, 31.

39 LIPTON,p. 228.
40 See above, fn. 1 1 .
4 1 H. LUBELL, “Urban development and unemployment in Calcutta”, International
Labour Review, July 1970, p. 30.
4 2 UNITEDNATIONS, p. 140. Some of the other projections also seem very high.
Hyderabad grew by 55.9% between 1950 and 1970, but is scheduled to grow by 108.7%
between 1970 and 1990!
43 K. C. ZACHARIAH, “Bombay migration study : a pilot analysis of migration to an
“Indian metropolis”’, in G . BREESE,ed., Urbanisation in Newly Developing Countries,
Prentice-Hall, 1966, p. 362.
and the probable resulting changes in incomes. With labour markets as

with other markets, the challenge to neo-classical economics is nor that
information may be bad, or people unresponsive to it; on the contrary,
labour markets 44 (like other markets) function reasonably well. The
challenge is that, because of prior distributions of resources and power,
the results of this “reasonable functioning” of markets are so appalling
in terms of persistent poverty. 45 Migration seldom impoverishes the mi-
grants; but the gains are unequally distributed, and external costs are
imposed on people relatively ill-prepared to bear them, but too weak,
politically and economically, to avoid them.
In rural areas, to identify gainers and losers, we need to know who
the townward migrants are. They tend to come from two groups : the fairly.
rich, and the fairly poor. The very poorest villagers cannot afford even
the risks and costs of moving; the very best-off, in Asia and Africa, tend
to stay and look after their assets. If we ranked villagers into ten equally-
sized groups by income-per-person, migrants would probably be likeliest

to come from the second-poorest and third-poorest groups - and from
the second-richest and third-richest groups. The better-off migrants are
“pulled” out, towards fairly firm prospects of education or a job; the
worse-off are “pushed” out, by rural poverty and by labour-replacing
methods. The poorer migrants tend to “step” via rural areas towards
progressively larger towns, first individually and seasonally, then moving
the whole household; the richer migrants tend to move direct to the
final goal, but in a “chain”, with successive household members in turn
reporting urban prospects to relatives in a maintained rural base. Surprisin-
gly but quite clearly, the poorer, “pushed”, stepwise, household-
totality migrants and the less-poor, “pulled”, chainwise, household-member
migrants tend strongly to come from the same villages : villages internally
unequal, especially in access to land ; villages, moreover, that are relatively
commercialized, near towns (but not so near as to encourage commuting),
and with relatively high average income, long duration of labour per work-
force participant, but relatively low workforce participation rates, especially
for women.46 All this, inevitably, is oversimplified to the point of cari-
cature ; but the picture, I believe, does not mislead.
What is happening, then, is that intru-village inequality provides
the better-off (seldom the best-off,) villagers with the resources for urban
education, job search, and thus pull-migration. In the same villages - the
44 A. BERRY and R. SABOT,“Labour market performance in developing countries”,

World Development, 6, 11-12, Nov.-Dec., 1978.
45 Analogous comments apply to the “adequate market” interpretations of small
farmer behavior (Hopper, Schultz), rural credit (Bottomley, Adams), marketing (Lele), etc.
46 The “ideal type” is spelled out, with detailed evidence, in CONNELL et a l . , espe-
cially chs. 1 , 8 and 9. (Age-standardised workforce participation rates in urban Gujarat
for women over 10 in 1972-3 were 14.9 percent, as against 52.0 percent in rural Gujarat.
In Maharashtra the respective ratios wer 14.5 percent (mostly Bombay) and 61.1 percent.
P. VISARIA, Living Standards, Employment and Education in Western India, ESCAP-IBRD
Project on Evaluation of Asian Data on Income Distribution, Working Paper no. 1 ,
Washington, D.C., December 1977, Appendix Tables 23-4.)
richer but also more unequal villages - intra-village inequality also pushes
the poor (seldom the poorest) into job search, because they have fewer
assets than in the less-unequal villages,47 and because the better-off are
likelier to have been willing and able 48 to replace labourers with tractors
or power-looms. On the other hand, the evidence is very weak that low
average village income as such, reflected in low land/man ratios, tends to
be associated with high imigration. 49 Does this mean, then, that urban bias
is not a major cause of imigration? Not at all; for urban bias not only
reduces average rural income (which may not increase emigration), but
also gives disproportionate power to those who gain from intra-rural
inequality (which certainly does increase emigration). Unequal landholding
in a village induces push and pull emigration from it. Without urban bias,
such unequal landholding could be attacked ; for many landlords would be
willing, sometimes eager, to be compensated in a proper land reform.
But, though such a reform should usually raise output (because smaller
holdings usually produce more per acre),s1 it will be opposed by urban

capital, labour, and government. This is because the urban fears that the
post-reform small farmers would eat most of what they grow, and
prefers an “unreformed” situation in which big farmers urbanise most of
their surplus output. “Retention of the rural population in the country-
side” requires land redistribution, and does not sufficiently happen because
land redistribution would involve “retention of the rural food (and invest-
ible) surplus in the countryside”. The urban decision-takers do not want
this.
Once we recognise intra-rural inequalities as the main cause of town-
ward migration, we can see that they are also likely to be a consequence
of it.52 First, ‘advanced’ villages, near the urban periphery - with higher
initial commercialization and income-per-person - are the first to learn of
urban opportunities, and to transmit the news among their members;
poorer villages learn later, when opportunities are largely taken up. This
pattern increases inter-village gaps in income-per-person. Second, as for
intra-village inequality, the better-off move to known study or job chances,
while the poorer are pushed townwards; so it is no surprise that poor
47
BHANWAR SINGH,Agrarian Structure, Economic Growth and Poverty :the Exper-
ience of Central Gujarat, submitted for D. Phil., Sussex, 1981, shows on pp. 211. 13 that,
in 4 narva villages with a history of exploitative and unequal tenure, greater inequality
outweighed much higher mean income, to generate a much higher incidence of poverty,
as compared with 3 ryotwari villages.
48 Because their larger share of larger incomes meant easier finance, and more power
to obtain scarce resources.

49 CONNELL et a / ., pp. 7-10.
5 0 Strictly, the evidence cited at fn. 49 shows only that people from poorer villages
do not migrate more; it does not disprove that, if a / / villages are made poorer
relative to towns, out-migration will increase. But the evidence suggests great caution in
any prediction of such an increase.
5 1 A. BERRYand W. CLINE,Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing
Countries, Johns Hopkins, 1979.

5 2 M. LIPTON,“Migration from rural areas of poor countries: the impact on rural
productivity and income distribution”, World Development, 8, 1, Jan. 1980.

migrants tend to raise income by a much smaller proportion than do better-

off migrants. Analogously a careful study of international migration in
Bangladesh suggests that the very substantial gains are almost wholly con-
fined to well-off migrants and their families.53 As for those who stay
behind in the villages, a quick look at conventional economics suggests
that migration should enrich them, because it means there is more land-
per-villager ; but migration leaves the remaining villagers, aiming to work
that land, more probably leaderless, old, or female in sexist societies;
and anyway the landless villagers gain much less than the landed from
the rise in land-per-villager.
Nor are other effects of emigration more promising for the rural poor.
We hear much of remittances, but the Connell study showed that village-
to-town remittances mainly to support education or job search (a) often
exceed remittances from town to village ; (b) always precede such remit-
tances - especially important for poor people, who often have to pay
high interest charges. It also showed that even gross town-to-village remit-
tance are small proportions, especially 2-7%, of village income, less for
poor labourers.
As for return migration, for poor and uneducated rural families it
is likely to involve penniless returnees, old or sick or sacked. For better-
off rural families, there is a much better prospect that returnees will be
old but healthy and wealthy.
Finally, the impact on the village of young male migrant absenteeism
also tends to harm the rural poor relative to the better-off, and perhaps
absolutely. Its short-run effect is to induce investments to replace migrant
labour (e.g. via tractors financed by remittances), and this curbs long-run
employment income.
So, while migrants choose rationally, and mostly gain from migration,
the remaining rural poor are likely to loose relative to the rural rich, and
perhaps absolutely. In urban areas, the income-distribution effects are
similar. Suppose the immigrants - and their initial urban sources of remit-
tances of savings from the village - are from the second-poorest and third-
poorest deciles (tenths) of rural people, and from the second-richest and
third-richest deciles. Income-per-person in the towns is two to four times
higher than in the countryside, but somewhat more unequal ;and the “poor”
immigrants are likely to improve their well-being, proportionately, much
less than the educated “better-off’ immigrants. Adding all this up, the
immigrants themselves are almost certain to make income in the town more
unequal.
That is if there is no effect of migration upon urban residents’
incomes. Such effects probably, in fact, further increase inequality within
the towns. The poorer immigrants compete with poor settled townspeople
for (a) jobs, perhaps slightly cutting ‘settled’ wages and employment ; and
(b) for house sites, raising congestion and rents. Better-off, educated rural-
53 S. A. ALI et a l . , Labour Migration from Bangladesh to the Middle East, World

Bank Staff Working Paper No. 454, Washington, D.C., April 1981, p. 137.
to-urban migrants are likelier to be responding to established demand for
labour than to be themselves establishing a glut of it. Moreover, the very
polarization of migrants between rich and poor - their underrepresentation
in the middle income deciles - automatically means that they increase
intra-urban inequality, though this statistical artefact is much less signi-
ficant than the social impact on existing townsmen. Rising marginal conges-
tion costs are externalized, to a large extent on the poorest of existing
squatters ; but the consequent rise in demand for house-sites represents
a benefit to property-owners, raising the value of their land and housing,
first in urban areas where poor people rent but ultimately in the
whole town.
Finally, what of gainers and losers as between town and country?
These effects seem to me the most serious of all. In India in the
mid-l960s, the value of the services of rural-born educated people living in
towns was at least 2.3% of rural income.54 While 1 in 5 students at
Delhi University came from the villages, only 1 in 14 returned there.55

For most universities and countries, the rural skill drain is even more
severe. But the effects at the “lower end”, though less measurable, may
be more serious still. Who is to lead the rural poor, either in technical
innovation or in socio-political organisation? Are the young and dynamic
people, instead, migrating, and thus helping to advance themselves and
their co-workers within the urban formal-sector elite, and thus to force
down rural people’s terms-of-trade and relative income-per-person even
further ?
One reason “why worry” is now clear. It rests on the probably

undesirable effects of even quite low rates of increase of urban population
shares - if brought about, as in Africa and most of Asia, mainly be
migrant flows of better-off and fairly-poor young men - on three dis-
tributions of income: within the village, within the town, and between
village and town. Yet, if migrants behave sensibly by moving (as they
usually do), they probably earn more afterwards than before. They earn
more mainly because they produce more. So GNP rises. Therefore, in
principle, the losers from migration can be more than compensated
out of the gains of the gainers. Migration can still leave everyone richer,
although all income-distributions get worse. 56 So why worry?
54 LIFTON(1977), p. 261.
55 A. M. KHUSRO, A Survey of Living and Working Conditions of Students of the
University of Delhi, Asia, London: 1967, pp. 31, 72, 77; V.K.R.V. RAO, University Educa-
tion and Employment, Delhi, Institute of Economic Growth, 1961, pp. 10-11.
56
For example, if two peoples, earning average income-per-person in a village, move
to the city, one to the top urban decile of income-per-person, one to the middle decile!
There are several mistakes in this hopeful view. First and

foremost, although migrants respond sensibly to incentives, they do not
respond to sensible incentives ! All sorts of factors artificially push
urban shares of investments, social services, and wages and price rewards
to residents. s7 By migrating, within their own countries, Pakistanis or
Argentinianss8 may even move into jobs where the value of their product,
at world prices, is less than the cost of raw materials- yet where foreign-
exchange pricing, selective protection, and other governmental decisions
render production attractive- and wages appealing to whose who can get
jobs. The wheat labourer now makes cars; at world prices, the car is
worth less than its imported components; but at national prices it looks
more valuable than the wheat, and the labourer’s higher wage appears
to him to justify his migration. But of course social product has fallen.
Many other factors leave one worried about the effect of migration
on efficiency and output, yet are not fully included in incentives
affecting the decision to migrate. There are risks of “overshooting”, as

ten migrants, uninformed of each other’s plans, fight for yesterday’s job.
There are costs of congestion, imposed by migrants on residents (and on
tomorrow’s migrants), but not reflected in today’s migrants’ wages or
rents. There is a substantial “learned” reduction, after families move from
village to town, in adult labour participation especially by females, and
even in the poorest income-groups. s9 There are big new transport costs,
often fossil-fuel-intensive, both because recent migrants are usually
workers and often (as in Colombo) reside far from the workplace, and be-
cause food, absorbing 5040% of poor people’s outlay, must now be hauled
from village to town.
Above all, there are dynamic losses of skills to the country-side.
Not only does this delay rural innovation - a fact that could be outweighed
if the migrants remitted, or brought back with them, appropriate tools or
skills. More seriously, extra power and ingenuity are placed in the hands
of decision-takers who would raise, even further, the urban bias in the
type and allocation of developmental resources. And this is inefficient
- tending to cut GNP - not just inequitable. Young, dynamic, intelli-
gent potential doctors, teachers or trade unionists, when they urbanise,
take to the towns the effective for better medical facilities, schools, wage-
rates. Yet it is already inefficient that, for example, the Philippines around
1964 had 125 doctors for every 100,000 people in places with more than
5,000 inhabitants, but only 17 per 100,000 in rural areas. 6o When the more
dynamic - and healthier - villagers move to the town, their pressures
s7 LIPTON, (1977), Ch. 13.

s8 In the 1960s Pakistan’s total net industrial output - apparently about 7 per cent
of GNP - was negative valued at world prices, i.e. inputs were worth more than outputs !
S.P. LEWIS,Pakistan :Industrialisation and Development, Oxford/DECD, 1971.
s9 VISARIA, Table 23, for instance, shows that in the poorest decile of house-holds
(ranked by per caput spending per month), the age-standardised participation rate for women
over 10 in 1972-3 was 62.3% in rural Gujarat, but 25.3% in urban Gujarat.
6a 0 .GISH,Doctor Migration and World Health, Bell, 1971.
increase the extent to which the allocation of doctors fails to maximise
their potential contribution to health and thus to output.
In summary, then, what are good and bad reasons to worry about
migration? First, we need not worry much, or mainly, about the rural-
urban migrants themselves. They choose to move, usually sensibly, and
are usually better able to protect themselves than the older, less-educated
people they have behind- or, indeed, that the wandering rural-to-
rural migrants. Second, we need not worry that rural-urban migration
is massive or swamping. Except in fast-growing or less-poor developing
countries, urban growth is not very fast, nor is migration the main cause
of it. Third, we must worry about the damage that even quite low emi-
gration rates can do ; to those who stay in the country - side - because
the migrants are atypical, and leave those who remain more unequal and
in some cases less innovative or poorer; to the urban poor, through
competition for work and homes ; to communities affected by serve im-
balance between numbers of men and women, and to the efficiency and
equity of urban-rural resource allocation, already far too skewed. Fourth,
we needn’t worry too much that migrants respond irrationally to incentives
(though risk, intrafamily conflict, and outdated migrant optimism do exist) ;
we should worry instead that incentives, set irrationally to attract the able
towards overendowed cities, succeed in putting the able where they can
organise to make the cities even more overendowed.
vz
What should be the goals of Third World governments with regard

to rural-to-urban migration? What goals and what policies can they in
fact adopt, given the pressures on and in them? The selection of policy
goals regarding migration can reasonably be subjected to three constraints :
that migration policy should no substantially slow down economic growth,
reduce equity, or impose forcets impede migrants. (Retention of potential
migrants in the countryside should not mean detention, as in South Africa:
urban bias is bad enough, without adding rural imprisonment !) Under these
constraints, three policy goals exist to reduce the rural-to-urban migrant
flow; to change the structure of a given flow - its human make-up,
places of origin, or places of destination; and to improve the impact of
migrant flows, given their size and their structure... Pressures on gov-
ernments direct them mostly towards the first goal - the reduction of
migrant flow. A recent U.N. enquiry to 116 Third World governments
showed that 90 of them wanted to slow down or reverse rural-to-
urban That is not surprising: recent or potential rural-to-
urban migrants are a small, diffuse, mobile group, keener on economic
61 U.N. (ECOSOC), Population Commission, 20th Session, Concise Reporr on hfoni-

torina of Population Policies, ElCN.91338, 22 Dec. 1978, pp. 27-8.
self-improvement and social resettlement than on political activism ;62 and

townward migration imposes its net external costs mainly on bigger,
stronger settled groups, especially organized urban labour and capital. 63
So-although rural-urban migration is by most comparative standards small
in today’s Thud World, is rationally chosen by those involved, and may be
needed to modernise - the eyes of most governments are fixed on redu-
ding its scale.
The scale of rural-urban migration may be altered - without force -
by public-sector actions affecting three features of the rural-urban balance :
the current income, facilities, and general immediate welfare obtainable
in rural vis-a-vis urban places; the likely scale and nature of rural and
urban growth in per-person output and income; and, within rural and
within urban places, the distribution of immediate welfare and of the gains
from growth.
Improving some immediate causes of rural welfare, notably access
to health and secondary schooling, 64 almost certainly delays townward

migration. More fundamentally, by reducing price biases against farm pro-
ducts (or townward favours in the allocation of doctors or housing or
‘fair price’ food shops), governments make it possible for a given rural
output and intra-rural distribution to keep more rural residents at a level
of welfare that will deter their emigration. Conversely, selective subsidies
to low-cost housing in urban but not rural places, etc., will in some small
measure attract more immigrants - all measures, artificially raising income
for townspeople, pull in migrants. Some such measures, on the contrary,
set and subsidize standards for existing urban populations that cannot be
extended to, or afforded by, immigrants. “Western” building regulations
and low upper limits on housing density - if enforced by and for existing
urban residents - transfer incomes among residents and among types of
builder, but above all create high rentals, space shortages, and reluctance
to build for rental, thus impeding immigration. Some labour legislation,
same wage minima, and many subsidised choices of capital-intensive urban
technique have similar. So do rules on the “proper” (i.e. Weston) proces-
ses or products or number of buteries, dairies, taxis, etc. Most effects
such laws and policies (which are seldom genuinely required for health
or safety) are created, or administered at the discretion of, the existing
urban yet they impoverish its potential rural competitors. By denying
such competitors work, or hawkers’ licences, or space to rent a home,
Occasional exceptions, such as India’s militant, ex-untouchable ‘Dalit Panthers’,

show precisely why the rule works; the Panthers are exceptions because their unusually
long history of migration to particular areas of concentration in Bombay, and (among rural
emigrants) their unusually firm cultural identity and sense of injustice, have led to unusually
coherent, militant organisation.
6 3 Conversely, organized urban capital’s benejr from extra ‘cheap labour is usually
small (because unskilled labour is already in excess supply, and capital-intensive growth
paths have already been adopted) ; usually negative externalities from migration count for
more.
64 CONNELL, pp. 51, 215 (health); 66-7 (education). Conversely a good village primary
- but no secondary - school could induce emigration.
these rules harm the rural poor by stopping them from migrating - so
as to protect established city builders, traders, residents, (much less
commonly) labour unions. By such rule the reward to a successful migrant
is increased somewhat; but a migrant’s chance to reap that reward, to
get a job or a house or a hawker’s licence, is reduced enormously.
Regulations, allocations, and price decisions, rendering rural life more
appealing, may be powerful ways to reduce townward migration.‘j’ Since
such rulings are currently biased against villages, and since villages start
poorer and less unequal than cities, amended rulings would (while deter-
ring migration) advance both equity and efficiency. Unfortunately, urban
politics and pressure-groups tend to produce other deterrents - urban
regulations to raise standards, cut densities, and “modernise” jobs by
raising capital and skill requirements and slowing down the growth of
labour absorption. However, just because more rural welfare would often
delay townward migration, we cannot at all assume that faster rural growth
would do so.
It all depends on who gains income from rural growth, and on wheth-
er such growth is achieved mainly with extra labour or by other methods.
If higher rural output is simply supplied to the cities (or their exporters)
at lower prices, most66 gains are passed to the towns, and migration to
them could even speed up. If many income gains are retained in vil.lages,
but distributed largely to the rural rich, then the resultant demands for
extra income are likely to be for town-made luxuries (and perhaps for
urban real estate), and livelihoods will not be created for the rural poor;
rather they may be attracted townwards. Only if the rural gains from extra
output are widely spread - corresponding to a labour-intensive rural
growth path and/or to a fairly equal distribution of land,67 - can we
expect that the rate of rural-to-urban migration will be moderated. Such
a process of moderation can be mediated through other rural areas.
For example, instead of moving to cities, many landless labourers
from Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh were pulled towards the Punjab’s
“green revolution”, for temporary harvest and post-harvest work, in
1967-73. Such rural retention - in this case by diverting rural-urban
towards rural-rural migration - has proved sadly vulnerable since 1973,
as mechanical reaper-binders have replaced labourers. In Chilalo, Ethiopia,
the “green revolution” in wheat and teff was deliberately steered, by the
Swedish aid donors, to a small-farm area; but what the donors in 1965-70
65 This statement, about rural areas as a whole, in no way contradicts the finding
(CONNELL,pp. 7-14; fn. 8) that wealthier villages do not systematically send out fewer
migrants than other villages.
66 There can still be gains in a wider spread of primary and secondary rural em-
ployment income, and - to some rural people - from the cheaper food.
67 It is instructive to contrast the performance in 1974-80 of two Malayan irrigation
projects financed by the World Bank, Muda and Kemubu. Only Kemubu succeeded in its
aim of substantially spreading durable income increases to poorer groups, because both
initial (pre-project) assets, especially land, and consequential political power were much more
unequally distributed in Muda. A forthcoming survey by Dr. Gibbon will document these
processes.
did not realise was that the small farmers were tenants-at-will, and were
turned out once the new seeds and fertilisers made large-scale farming
profitable. The landlords, turned commercial farmers, found that tractors
and even combines paid, in the context of quick, modern cultivation. (Since
politicians, too, respond to incentives, it is incidentally comforting to know
that chickens come home to roost : that artificial credit or fuel subsidies,
given by urban politicians to big surplus farms for labour-displacing
machinery, ultimately push discontented migrants to the towns. Jobless,
the dispossessed turned to Addis Ababa, contributing to a well-known
political result.)
What all this teaches us is that - although extra rural welfare almost
always retards townward migration - two apparently logical analogies
do not apply. First, extra urban welfare needn’t speed migration up -
the opposite can happen if the extra welfare is achieved by “protection”
of urban jobs or standards by means that prevent newcomers from sharing
in the welfare gains. Second, extra rural growth needn’t mean fewer town-
ward migrants - if it is achieved by means involving the displacement
of poor rural workers of landowners, (or if it is in crops price-inelastic
demand), townward migration can speed up.
What, then, of the third way to affect townward migration : operating
on intra-urban, intra-rural, or urban-rural income-distribution ? In cities,
more equal distribution is likely to mean lower imports, more demand
for food, and hence - unless that extra food is produced largely by big
farms, with capital rather than labour - less pressure upon villagers to
emigrate. But the effect of the rise in urban propensities to consume due
to intra-urban equalisation in slowing migration via demand for rural
products is only half the story. The other half is its effect in speeding
migration via demand for products of urban workers. That effect does no
operate only via demand ; indeed it is hard to see how urban equality can
increase, in most poor countries, except by a switch to products, proces-
ses and equipment creating more jobs, and less profit income, out of each
unit of urban GNP. But that switch must mean more jobs, probably some-
what higher wage-rates, and hence more attraction to migrants.
Probably, urban equalization means more migration; at best the
results are unclear; and anyway, of all three sorts of equalization (within
towns, within the countryside, between country and town), urban equaliza-
tion is least discussed because politically least feasible. Rural equalization
is much more clearly likely to cut emigration rates, as inter-village compa-
risons suggest.68 Fewer of the fairly well-off will get the resources to
buy into urban education and job search ; and fewer of the fairly poor will
be pushed out by poverty, landlessness, or the capital-intensifying (and
capital-subsidy-seeking) nature of progressive big farming.
The finding, that equalization within villages retards townward
migration, is thus clearer and less hedged with conditions than the hope
that higher rural growth will do so. Nevertheless, the reduction of biases
et al., ch. 9.
CONNELL
RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE RETENTION O F RURAL POPULATION 29
against rural growth - biases involving rural underinvestment, underedu-
cation and underadministration - is in most case a politically more pro-
mising route to slower migration than is intra-rural equalization (though
both rural-urban and intra-ruralequalization, unlike intra-urban, are likely
to raise efficiency and output.69) The cost to urban decision-makers of
inadequate rural performance ; the fact that such inadequacy is patently
caused by rural resource underendowment, not by rural “inefficiency” ;
the damage done, to the performance of town-centred systems of
education or transport or small-industry development, by the fact that so
many promising beneficiaries are excluded by rural poverty due to anti-
rural bias - all these mean increasingly clear costs, to powerful
groups70 of urban people, from urban bias. The harm done to urban de-
cision-makers by intra-rural inequality is less obvious ; the urban elite’s
gains from it, by concentrating rural investment and income, land and
power, in hands that will sell food to the cities and reinvest profits there,
are more transparent. And - while rural growth will reduce townward
migration only to the extent that it is labour-intensive and/or provides
many livelihoods by even distribution of its gains - rural growth induced
by correction of urban bias (and not merely by higher rural saving at the
cost of rural consumption) does involve in most cases an increase in static
rural welfare. That increases the attraction of staying in villages, and
provides the rural family with attractive ways, other than migration, to
spread its risks. 71
* * *
Reduced intra-village inequality (which often depends on land redis-

tribution and which is not a very likely aim of policy in many, perhaps
most, poor countries) and reduced urban-rural inequality via reduced pro-
urban bias in resources and incentives (which is more plausible) are in their
own right desirable for reasons of efficiency and equity. It is in normal
times of secondary importance - though true - that policies to these
ends usually slow down rural-urban migrant flows. For these slow, rational
flows are normally not a major problem ; appropriate policies towards
such flows should rather concentrate on their consequences and structure
- on reallocating the costs and benefits of migration, and improving its
composition, origin and destination - than on reducing the absolute num-
69 LIPTON(1977), esp. chs. 8, 13, on rural-urban; Berry and Cline on intra-rural.

’O Such groups often find echos in parts of Third World bureaucracies where direct
career benefit from, and commitment to, poverty-reduction is present, as well as idealism.
Administrators of India’s ‘Drought-prone Areas Programs’ and ‘Small Farmers’ Develop-
ment Associations’, and regionally of Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme and W.
Bengal’s Comprehensive Area Development Program, exemplify this.
On migration as a family strategy for handling risk, see various papers - of great
conceptual interest -by 0. STARK, some stemming from his Sussex University Ph. D. thesis
(Utility, technological change, surplus and risk :the micro-economics of rural-to-urban labour
migration in less developed evonomies, mimeo, Brighton, 1975).
bers of townward migrants. Such reduction becomes important only

because the next five or six years may be exceptionally hard times for
modernising, integrative development strategies ; may require a stress on
survival rather than growth; may penalise very heavily those townward
migrants who put excessive trust in modern urban employment; and may
therefore require incentives to cut absolute townward migration, for all its
integrative force and “chosen-ness” and smallness, in favour of the tem-
porary development of urban and rural subsistence strategies instead.
These speculative matters are best left for closing remarks. First, a
little needs to be said about strategies for affecting migrant structure,
origin, destination, and impact. Little, indeed, can be said. It is amazing
but true that - although analysts have concentrated almost obsessively
on how to reduce the not-so-large scale of townward migration - almost
nothing is known about how to affect the much more substantial and
much more clearly harmful imbalances within it : imbalance of structure,
origin, and destination.

First, due to selective emigration, age-and sex-structures and tenibly
unbalances in many places of destination, and in some places of origin.72
It could cynically, be argued that 14 men for every 10 women of child-
bearing age in many cities - and corresponding, though proportionately
much smaller, rural imbalances - at least constituted a rough and steady
mean of fertility control.
Britain’s 1854 poor Law Amendement Act, similarly, civilary the
sexes in workhouses, a prominent critic, Lord Brougham, said he would
keep the Minister responsible, Chadwick, apart from his wife, since other-
wise “you might breed”. Humanity apart, there are major economic costs
involved in the attendent effects on crime, sexually transmitted disease,
and family life. Policy to locate secondary and tertiary education, and
(more important) public-sector employment, could surely seek much more
deliberately to avoid worsening already unbalanced demographic structures.
Second, townward migration is highly uneven among places of origin.
Part of this uneveness is a rational response to distance;73 part is remedi-
able lack of information or transport; but much is due to unequal chances
as between rural areas. We stressed that irttravillage inequality raised a
nation’s townward migration rate, but the impact of interregional rural
inequality on that rate is unclear; however the effects in unbalancing
migration, in making for very high rates (and problems) in some areas and
virtually no migration (or opportunities), in others, are clear. For example,
semi-arid rural areas have limited prospects of rapid (let alone labour-
intensive) growth, but usually expel very few migrants. Yet many rural
areas - often near cities - with good prospects, due to irrigation systems
and high-yielding varieties, expel many migrants. Often, promising
farmland is denuded of workers while unpromising areas have too many.
’* Sex-ratios for all age-groups conceal these imbalances. Problems in some destina-
tions, e.g. Calcutta with over 13 men for every 10 women aged 15-49, are familiar. Less
well-known is the rarer (but also serious) heavy and opposite imbalance in places of ongin
for massive contract emigration to mining towns, e.g. Kgatleng District, Botswana.
73 CQNNELL et al., pp. 72-8.
Yet urban growth policies often take little account of whether the rural
hinterland, from which they will draw migrants, is more or less capable
of supporting such migrants. On the contrary, some growing cities expand
into and destroy fertile farmland - and draw in migrants from nearby,
similarly promising areas.
Third, what of imbalances in migrant flows among destinations ’?
It is untrue, in general, that “megalopolis” in stagnant or very poor coun-
tries has either a very large or a specially fast-growing share of popula-
tion. However, it probably is true that the welfare and efficiency effects
of the distribution of rural migrant flows among towns, cities and areas
could in most such countries be substantially improved by appropriate
adjustments in allocations (of health, education, site-and service, subsidies,
transport, etc.), incentives, or information.
* * *
Finally, suppose we accept that size, structure, origin and destination

of migrant flows are all fixed. How can the impact of these flows be im-
proved? The most obvious problem, and one of the most serious, has
involved health, sanitation, and water supply in squatter and slum settle-
ments. External damage here is high; new migrants impose steeply rising
costs on existing slum-dwellers (many of them, of course, non-migrants).
Much damage, too, is fully anticipated by the migrants themselves. How-
ever, the health effects are often alarming. Site-and-service and squatter-
upgrading programmes, such as the urban shelter schemes of the World
Bank, have had major impact on very poor urban communities affected
by immigration - reaching, for example, half the population of Lusaka;
and with benefits well down into the poorest one-fifth of town dwellers,
in San Salvador. 74
Such attempts to improve urban shelter and sanitation are excellent
ways to reduce damaging side-effects, especially external ones, of town-
ward migration. Since expected change in quality of housing is only a small
part of anticipated benefits from urbanisation - much smaller than the
intended change of income source - it is unlikely that site-and-service
or squatter-upgrading will substantially self-destruct by pulling in ever-
denser rural migrant inflows. This is especially true of World Bank schb-
mes - less because migrants really bear costs via the ‘site-and-service’
notion (which often takes second place to contractor work) than because
of emphasis on cost recovery and thus on avoiding subsidies to urban dwel-
lers. However, it does seem odd to cope with urban shelter selectively
and well, when rural shelter, especially as regards drinking water and
sanitation, is so much w0rse.~5Also, many of these housing schemes
do little for subsequent production ; indeed municipal authorities, especially
~
74 D. KEAREis documenting this in the context of a multi-volume IDRC/World Bank

project to evaluate aid to urban shelter.
75 Typically, Botswana has a “low-cost housing officier” - for urban areas only.
in Africa, often impose zoning rules preventing promising lines of produc-

tion, e.g. poultry, in such upgraded township areas. It would be especially
important, in extending such urban projects to include business as a support,
to avoid subsidising urban employment or enterprise while rural counter-
parts were denied such subsidy. Nevertheless, shelter schemes are a pro-
mising approach to managing external urban costs of migration. What
is now needed is a counterpart to reduce external rural costs, especially
to poor rural people not benefited by remittance income, but harmed by
migratory impacts on rural age - or sex-structures, leadership of workers,
or labour/capital mix in production. How, for example, can agricultural
extension, new crop-mixes, labour intensive improvements in draught
power, or rural artisanship best be exploited by poor rural women, in
villages heavily affected by selective male urbanisation ?
VII
Rural-urban migration fascinates not only politicians and civil ser-

vants, but also economists and other social scientists. This is largely be-
cause it is a test-bed for their theories of equilibrium. People suffering
local and avoidable poverty, especially as a nation develops towards more
urban and concentrated economic forms, are supposed to “vote with
their feet”, especially by moving - often stepwise - from the poorest
rural homes, the least promissing farm areas, towards the most promising
urban prospects. Migration within the U.S. and N.W. Europe since about
1900 - while never as smooth as this model suggests - does approach
this pattern.
Morever, the pattern in most poor countries today is completely dif-
ferent. The very poorest villagers usually cannot afford the initial risks
and costs of migration, to gain an uncertain benefit later. Nor does
the typical poor, remote village - though it may have most to gain from
urban job chances - learn of them until they have been mopped up
by migrants from more advanced villages. Moreover, townward migration
within poor countries-apart from being structured in ways that impede it
from equalising rewards - is not enough, or fast enough, to do that;
and it sets up countervailing forces, operating on factors from sex-ratios
to urban rents, that limit its effects on the urban population share. In
today’s poor countries, townward migration is at best a weak source of
equilibrium - of achieved rural and urban satisfaction with results -
especially among non-migrants, who bear external costs. In many ways,
such migration does more to set up new disequilibria than to correct old
ones - especially since both existing and extra output are almost certainly
more employment-generating in the rural areas which migrants leave, than
in the towns where they compete for work.
Migration helps migrants. This is offsetting cost to non-migrant fa-
milies, but not enough to justify anti-migration policies as such. Policies
to reduce urban bias, and intra-rural and rural-urban inequality - already
justified on efficiency and equity grounds - gain some extra justification
because they remove artiJicial incentives to excess migration. Morever,
piling on migration itself should be concerned less with reducing volume,
and more with improving balance, distribution and impact.
The is tone for “normal times”, anyway. In this sense, how “abnor-
mal” is today’s changing international environment ? Does it make urba-
nisation riskier, disasters likelier and less predictable? Is the case for a
“lean towards subsistence” in both rural and urban policy therefore
stronger in the 1980s than the above “timeless” arguments imply?
* * *
Between Independence and the mid-l970s, a fair reply to the above
worries would have been that one cannot make an omelette - neither the
omelette of growth-orientation nor the omelette of effective, politically-
aware organizations of poor people - without letting migrants break eggs,

at least to the extent of temporarily harming some settled persons in the
places of origin and destination. Tentatively, I suggest that since the mid-
1970s the balance of advantage has sharply changed.
Townward migration implies betting on fairly smooth urban growth -
on futures rather like pasts. Such bets are going increasingly, disruptively
wrong. The costs and risks, not only to migrants and communities of
origin and destination but to entire poor countries, of preferring growth to
survival, integration to subsistence, mobility to stability, may temporarizy
have become prohibitive. It may a time, except for the most fortunately
placed poor countries, for reculer pour mieux sauter, not least on rural-
urban migrant flows. This is because an increasing proportion of risks and
costs, facing potential townward migrants, are either imposed on non-
migrants and thus not part of the choice process, or new, remote, inter-
national, unpredictable, and thus or otherwise removed from the potential
migrant’s calculations, whether of what can be rationally expected or of
what will diversify his family portfolio and cut risk.
The increasing international risks and costs, facing most poor coun-
tries for the next few years, are likely to include :
- fluctuating, in the medium term almost certainly rising, relative
costs of fossil fuels (perhaps with disruptions in supplies at any price) ;
- fluctuating, and until about 1984-5 probably declining, inflows of
concessional aid in real terms (i.e. deflated by import costs) per person
in the recipient countries, accompanied by falling ratios of public to private
capital inflows ;
- falling real purchasing-power of many Third World export revenue
totals earned from rich countries, due to both recession and protection
there ; the latter especially being hard to predict.
Of course, one or more of these three gloamy probabilities for the
Third World to the mid-eighties - dearer oil, scarcer aid, tighter export
markets may not be realized; or may be more predictable, more planna-
ble, than is here anticipated ; or may affect only some developing countries.
However, Third World policymakers, for migration or anything else, would
be unwise to assume less gloomy forecasts. These reflect only a ‘middle

view’ - roughly that of the projections in the current World Development
Report of the World Bank and in the current U.N.C.T.A.D. Trade and De-
velopment Report. 76 I myself take a gloomier view, not of the most likely
outcome, but of the risks. In my personal judgement, a downtrend in in-
flation rates - combined with rising real rates of interest - will prove
the “last straw” for some developing-country borrowers. They are faced
with substantial debts at fixed nominal interest, which become more bur-
densome as inflation rates rise (i.e. as nominal rates fall more slowly than
inflation does). Especially for some middle-income borrowers with de-
clining real export proceeds, the burden of debt could become intolerable.
Defaults, whether or not disguised as “reschedulings” and thus made pala-
table, seem likely to become more frequent.77 To the extent that such
defaults are concentrated on a few banks, which thereby become increa-
singly unattractive to O.P.E.C. and other depositors, those banks will be
obliged to curtail both loans and overdraft facilities - not only to Third
World customers but to prime industrial borrowers -by perhaps three to six
times the amount defaulted.78 The risk of sharp recessionary impacts -
especially for Third World countries whose command over imports depends
on Western countries’ loan-financed demand for their raw material exports
- is in my personal view very grave. (I must here stress that all re-
marks in this paper, especially the previous one, commit nobody except
myself, and are not necessarily, nor even probably, World Bank views !)
What have these four foreign costs and risks - to oil, aid, exports,
and capital-markets - to do with rural-to-urban migration ? In particular,
why should Third World governments see them as justifying a shift from
integration to subsistence, from mobility to stability, from growth to survi-
val? I should like to point out three aspects of the impact on mi-
gration of these costs and risks: the impact on rural vis-a-vis urban
production, consumption and transportation, and on rural-to-urban swit-
ches in these activities ; the relative advantages of production for nearby
and for distant markets, and for subsistence; and the balance between
so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, or as one ought perhaps to say ‘orga-
nised’ and ‘family’, styles of productive organization.
The main reason why fossil-fuel costs (and uncertainties) create high,
hidden costs of migration, costs often not borne by migrants and there-
fore not discouraging them, is that rural production, consumption and
transport in developing countries are all usually much less fossil-fuel-inten-
sive, per unit of value and per unit of growth, than urban.
Rural production consists to a much greater extent of farm output.
Average farm output requires under half the fossil-fuel energy of average
76 WDR 1981, ch. 2 ; and, for a shorter-term but roughly consistent view,
U.N.C.T.A.D., (Geneva), Trade and Development Report, New York, 1981, ch. 2.
77 M. LIFTON,“World depression by Thud World default?”, Bulletin of the Institute
of Development Studies, 12, 2 , June 1981, and Vierteljahresberichte, 84, Bonn : Forschung-
sinstitut der Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, June 1981.
78 D. GELDENHUYS, Money and Banking, McGraw Hill, 1975, pp. 10-11; A. C. L.
DAY,Outline of Monetary Economics, Oxford, 1957, pp. 130-1.
non-farm output per unit of product in India. Extra India output in the
1970s came much more from “modern” than from “traditional” methods,
both in farming and elsewhere, and thus required far more energy (and
energy-intensive inputs), per unit of value-added, than average output ;
but the excess fossil-fuel needs, per unit of extra output compared with
pre-growth output, were in India much more for non-farm products than
for farm products. 7 9 African farm output is even less energy-intensive than
Indian. Moreover, the types of energy used by farm output, even in India,
are much less fossil-fuel-orientated than for the rest of the economy;
apart from human and animal draught and transport, the main
energy requirements of farming are through irrigation (often in hydel sys-
tems that are net producers of energy) and nitrogenous fertilisers (often
requiring local feedstocks, notably natural gas, not fully substitutable for
imported oil and in more reliable supply). All these considerations apply,
though less forcibly, to non-farm output in rural as against urban areas;
cheaper and often nearer human effort readily substitutes for fossil fuels
in many uses.
Rural consumption consists to a much larger extent of food, especially
cereals and root crops, than urban, for three reasons : rural average income-
per-person is lower, so people spend a bigger proportion on food; rural
income-distribution is more equal, and people spend a higher share of extra
income on food when poor than when rich; and, due to transport costs,
food is usually cheaper in the country than in the town, whereas non-food
is usually cheaper in the town than in the country. Foods, especially cereals
and tubers, require less energy to produce than non-foods. Therefore rural-
to-urban migration increases the energy requirements of consumption,
albeit as a natural part of the growth process.
Intra-rural transport between home and work, point of produc-
tion and point of market, is plainly less costly per unit of output than
is intra-urban transport, and more likely to use head-loads, human legs,
or animals, as opposed to gasoline, diesel or coal. Also rural-to-urban
migration involves large extra transport costs, mainly because previously
‘localised’ food demand - often from the migrant’s own farm - now has
to be met by food moved to the town, sometimes from remote rural surplus
areas or from abroad, and usually by fossil-fuel-driven transport.
None of these rural-urban differences in energy costs and types would,
even in combination with energy prospects for the 1980s, justify a policy
‘tilt’ against rural-urban migration if four conditions held. First, the differ-
ences would have to be fully reflected in costs borne, or prices paid,
by each individual urban, rural, or migrating producer, consumer and
transporter. Second, such costs and prices would somehow have to allow
for future changes in energy prices and availabilities, or to be at once
adjusted after such changes. Third, flexibility among types of energy use,
and of production, consumption and transport with different energy re-
quirements, when energy prices or availabilities changed, would either
have to be much the same in city and village, o r , if different, to be fully
7 9 M. LIPTON, “Risks to security of food supply in India”, in E. CLAY(ed.), Nario-
nalfood security posirions, World Bank staff working paper, Feb. 1981.
reflected in relative prices through some form of risk premium. Fourth,

income-distribution effects of oil-price rises (or risks) would need to get
no worse as a result of townward migration - or, if they did worsen,
the poor who lost would need compensation.
It is, unfortunately, quite obvious that these four conditions, required
if incentives to migrants are to deal adequately with risks and costs of
migration in the energy environment of the 1980s, do not hold. Two parti-
culars need bringing out.
First, not even current extra transport costs of food movements, im-
plicit in townward migration, are fully imposed on the migrant, but are
largely externalised to other food consumers and producers ; and especially
if food transport involves seasonal rail bottlenecks - between surplus and
deficit areas as in South Asia, between port and towns as in East Africa -
extra food transport, to feed an urban population increase, costs far more
per ton than average transport before such an increase.
Second, the flexibility under stress of rural activities and hence their
ease of transfer from fossil-fuel-intensive to other lines, is far greater than
that of urban activities. If oil becomes suddenly dearer or scarcer, farms
can shift inputs and outputs so as to use less fertiliser and more cow-
dung, less tractor-power and ox-power. Rural consumers can switch from
buses and donkey-carts, from kerosene to wood. It is much harder to make
corresponding shifts in urban areas, with mush more specific capital in
production (steel mill) and consumption (electric cookers).
If we combine these two points, we will also observe that migration
itself sets up patterns of demand for food and other transport. These
patterns fix supplies, and do so in ways that are relatively reliant on fossil-
fuels; that feature rising marginal cost; and that are not readily switched
- let alone switched off - in energy crisis.
Time, space, laziness, and the wish to leave something to your ima-
gination prevent consideration, even at this superficial level, of the impact
on townward migration costs and policies of the other costs and risks of the
1980s: to Third World exports, to aid, to capital markets. Suffice it to say
that all raise the likely future costs of, and uncertainties about access to,
foreign exchange and imports; to aid, to capital markets. Suffice it to say
that all raise the likely future costs of, and uncertainties about access to,
foreign exchange and imports; and that all therefore render risky and
potentially costly, in ways largely unreflected in present incentives and
disincentives to migrants, the shift from rural to urban residence. This shift
tends to raise import costs (in production, consumption and transport)
ahead of export revenues - and such a strategy depends on export
buoyancy, or access to borrowing. Yet just these are at risk.
Migration policy - which can at best make smallish changes in smal-
lish flows - clearly cannot, on its own, sufficiently or quickly cut those
risks. Morever, it can help, in the content of a more general policy adjust-
ment.
This is the adjustment towards rural and urban subsistence produc-
tion, and towards family producer-consumers as against organised private-
sector or public-sector commercial employers. Such an adjustment is a
temporary desideratum for the special costs and risks of the 19803, not a
permanent policy goal. Moreover, I do not at all suggest a policy “lean’’
towards such units - only the end of the present, costly and risky, policy
“lean” against them. Instead of subsidising the import, capital and fuel
costs of larger-scale activities - and even of so-called “small industry”,
the natural competitor against the rural or urban family producer - Go-
vernments will increasingly find it cheaper and safer, for political as well
as economic survival, to see that a larger share of public resources
creates training and infrastructure, not just for the formal employer,
but also for family producers ; and to see that prices, regulations, and edu-
cation are less heavily biased against them. That would lead to more loca-
lised production and consumption, and probably to less migration. It im-
plies a new stress on research, technical training, market information,
tools and credit for “subsistence producers” of food - even deficit far-
mers can and do repay loans, because extra food production means they
need to buy less food - and for family artisans. Probably, it also means
a shift away from the non-farm urban “informal sector” to the non-farm
rural family artisan.
Within towns, the lean to subsistence implies the encouragement of
appropriate urban food production. Not only can this reduce the impact of
the 1980s extra costs and risks as they endanger urban food - especially
if imported and the transport to carry it. It can also enable urban family
artisans and traders to survive the shocks, such as the non-arrival of raw
materials or the failure of markets that are increasingly likely nowadays,
and that have been such frequent causes of informal-sector bankruptcies,
or of takeovers by formal-sector undertakings.
Urbanization is a process as long as development and as wide as
the world. It accompanies specialization, mobility, learning, market inte-
gration. Townward migration in most poor countries has not been unduly
rapid, and has not produced megalopolis; nor will this soon change. The
main medium-term evils associated with migration - the “growing pains”
- are best dealt with by policies to relieve the undesired impacts directly
(e.g. squatter-settlement upgrading) ; to restructure incentives affecting mi-
gration (e.g. to involve larger proportions from remote rural areas with
poor farm prospects and small or negative excesses of females) ; and above
all to decrease rural-urban and intra-rural inequality, especially to the
extent that such inequality is also inefficient.
However, to reach the long run, one must survive the short run.
There is an usually high risk, especially for the poor countries in Africa
with their worsening food deficits, that the next five years or so will be
the most difficult and uncertain period for development since 1945. Oil,
aid, commercial loans, export markets - all are at risk, and all are likely
to get scarcer. Integration for the economy, local specialisation; and urban-
ization depend heavily on all four. To persist with incentives and alloca-
tions that expose people - and systems - to the costs and uncertainties
of more-than-minimal net urbanization in this period could be appallingly
risky.

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rate of rural migration is smaller than usually believed. Second, it shows

Politicians, civil servants, businessmen and scholars alike seek to un-

different things in different countries : typically census authorities in Africa

Among the many questions we must address, I should like to focus

J . CONNELL, B. DASGUPTA, R. LAISHLEY and M. LIFTON,Migration from Rural

- 2500, 2000 or even less - between urban and rural communities.*S

l 4 K. C. ZACHARIAH and J. C O N D Migration

D.C., 1981, pp. 47-9.

They contained 4.26% of these countries’ populations. In the really poor

30 See source cited at fn. 26 for discussion of data base.

populations will be in older age-groups where, as in Bombay, net rural-to-

Who gains from townward migration? Who loses? We know a good

38 UNITEDNATIONS, pp. 10, 31.

and the probable resulting changes in incomes. With labour markets as

sized groups by income-per-person, migrants would probably be likeliest

44 A. BERRY and R. SABOT,“Labour market performance in developing countries”,

holdings usually produce more per acre),s1 it will be opposed by urban

to obtain scarce resources.

Countries, Johns Hopkins, 1979.

productivity and income distribution”, World Development, 8, 1, Jan. 1980.

migrants tend to raise income by a much smaller proportion than do better-

53 S. A. ALI et a l . , Labour Migration from Bangladesh to the Middle East, World

Delhi University came from the villages, only 1 in 14 returned there.55

One reason “why worry” is now clear. It rests on the probably

There are several mistakes in this hopeful view. First and

affecting the decision to migrate. There are risks of “overshooting”, as

s7 LIPTON, (1977), Ch. 13.

What should be the goals of Third World governments with regard

61 U.N. (ECOSOC), Population Commission, 20th Session, Concise Reporr on hfoni-

self-improvement and social resettlement than on political activism ;62 and

to health and secondary schooling, 64 almost certainly delays townward

Occasional exceptions, such as India’s militant, ex-untouchable ‘Dalit Panthers’,

Reduced intra-village inequality (which often depends on land redis-

69 LIPTON(1977), esp. chs. 8, 13, on rural-urban; Berry and Cline on intra-rural.

bers of townward migrants. Such reduction becomes important only

origin, and destination.

Finally, suppose we accept that size, structure, origin and destination

74 D. KEAREis documenting this in the context of a multi-volume IDRC/World Bank

in Africa, often impose zoning rules preventing promising lines of produc-

Rural-urban migration fascinates not only politicians and civil ser-

aware organizations of poor people - without letting migrants break eggs,

be unwise to assume less gloomy forecasts. These reflect only a ‘middle

reflected in relative prices through some form of risk premium. Fourth,

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