The impact of regional growth on internal migration: a district-level analysis for Malawi

Research on the nexus between development and migration has mainly focused on cross-border flows. How income changes affect migration within developing countries is much less well researched even though addressing this topic might provide essential information about the process of structural transformation needed for economic development. In this paper, we provide new evidence on the link between income growth and internal migration for Malawi, a developing country where migration is predominantly internal. Employing a gravity approach and performing an instrumental variable regression based on a shift-share instrument, we robustly find that, on average, rising incomes – proxied by changes in nightlight intensity – are associated with higher emigration rates. This effect is mainly driven by people emigrating from comparably richer urban areas. In the poorer rural districts, by contrast, migration tends to fall with increasing economic activity, which is in accordance with the notion that poverty may force people to leave their home in response to negative shocks. Our results also suggest a specific sorting pattern: While in urban areas rising incomes mainly facilitate the emigration of lower-skilled people to non-urban destinations, in rural areas it is higher-skilled people who most likely leave their home in response to falling incomes, often moving to urban destinations. This empirical finding is consistent with a standard theoretical model where populations sort themselves geographically on the basis of skills, for which there is relatively higher demand and a higher return in urban areas.

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