What drives migration moves to urban areas in Spain? Evidence from the Great Recession

ABSTRACT

During the Great Recession international emigration skyrocketed while internal migration strongly declined. However, when the focus is on migration to the larger urban areas in Spain, an increase in population since the outbreak of the crisis is observed. This study determines the effect of labour market factors on migration flows to 45 Spanish functional urban areas for the recent recession period. The results indicate that wages and employment rates greatly influence migration to cities. The results are presented by considering both provinces and local labour market areas as flows’ origins. From the results, the strong role of labour markets in migration to cities can be confirmed.

KEYWORDS:

• migration
• Spanish urban areas
• labour market factors

JEL:

• C23
• J61
• R23

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees as well as the participants at the 56th ERSA Congress, the XIIth Spanish meeting of Labour Economics, the XLIInd Spanish meeting of Regional Science, the 28th ERSA and ERES Summer School, and the seminars at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, the Universidad del Norte –Colombia and the Universitat de Vic – Spain.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As specified in the data section, we consider only moves beyond a distance threshold to avoid calling moves that only imply a residential variation ‘migration’. We follow the generic rule of 100 km to eliminate pairs of flows that can conceal moves within the same labour market because of the cross-border effect.

2. We consider returnees as those nationals who migrate to a municipality of the urban area where they were born.

3. We admit that additional reverse causality can take place if there is a strong persistence in the considered variables of the model. However, we expect that as gross internal migration flows in Spain represent a small share of the labour market, once we account for other factors, such an impact on the residuals can be expected to be low.

4. Given the vast fixed effects structure, we used the Stata command ppmlhdfe, designed by Correia et al. (2019), to estimate Poisson models with high-dimensional fixed effects.

5. We consider specifically the cases that affect the number of municipalities in the FUAs. These are the cases of Villanueva de la Concepción and La Canonja municipalities, which emerged during the considered period because of the disaggregation from Antequera and Tarragona, respectively. We also take into account the case of Oza-Cesuras, which emerged from the aggregation of Oza Dos Rios and Cesuras, which no longer exist.

6. Tables A1 and A2 in Appendix A in the supplemental data online report the total and urban moves in Spain by distance. Total moves between 90 and 120 km represented 4.8% of all moves, while moves towards FUAs were 4.1%. Within this average threshold, every 10 km threshold represents, on average, some 1% of total flows.

7. For detailed information about the data sets and components and sources of information, see Table A3 in Appendix A in the supplemental data online. For descriptive statistics, see Table A4 online.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [grant number ECO2016-75805-R].