Urban exodus in Tokyo during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to explore why urban exodus occurred in Tokyo during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using panel-level data from 203 municipalities, we estimated the impact of epidemic, medical, economic, and industrial factors on the movement of people across cities in the Tokyo metropolitan area during the pandemic. We found that fear of infection was one of the main factors driving the urban exodus in Tokyo and that people chose to live in reasonably priced habitable areas during the pandemic. We also found that the population increased when the municipality had an essential sector in which remote work was difficult but decreased when it had an industry in which remote work was relatively feasible. However, medical factors had contrasting effects on out-migration and in-migration in each municipality. Increases in hospitals and medical doctors may not have increased the attractiveness of the city because of the malfunctioning of the healthcare system during the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• urban exodus
• Tokyo metropolitan area
• fear of infection

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R12
• R23
• and R30

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The essential results did not change even if we include dummy for 2020 and that for 2021 respectively.

² We also investigated population density for the proxy. However, the results were similar with those of employment density.

³ Since the data of National Census is available only every five years, we constructed its annual data by interpolation.

⁴ We controlled for regional characteristics such as distance from the city centre and suburban dummies.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI [21K20137].