Unit 3.2 - Governance - Rural-Urban Migration Flashcards
What are the push factors in rural areas in developing countries?
Population increase - too many people chasing too few jobs.
Agricultural modernisation - agro-industrial MNCs, such as Monsanto, mechanise agriculture by introducing machines that require few people to operate them.
Land reforms and land grabs - indigenous people, including subsistence farmers and nomadic cattle herders, cannot always prove legal ownership of the land beneath them, and so lose out to land grabs by powerful TNCs, triggering a rural exodus.
Transport and technology improvements - they accelerate the process by making the move to cities easier and by aiding the spread of information about urban opportunities to previously switched-off rural areas.
What are the pull factors in urban areas?
Mass rural-urban migration in developing countries and emerging economies is driven by employment opportunities. Large cities in developing countries offer migrants opportunities in both the formal sector and the informal sector, such as fishing in Lagos lagoons. Employment opportunities have grown in recent decades due to global supply chain growth in export processing zones (EPZs), which are part of the global shift of manufacturing and service industries from developed countries to emerging economies. EPZs are developed by national governments to attract foreign direct investment, while multinational corporations outsource their manufacturing output to these zones to cut costs and increase profits.
What is global urbanisation?
Urbanisation is the increase in the percentage of a country’s population living in urban areas instead of rural areas. There is an ongoing increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas. The wave of urbanisation currently taking place is the greatest ever. In 1980, around two billion people lived in cities - at that time, 40% of humanity. By 2011, the share reached 50%, representing almost 3.5 billon people – around one-third of whom live in slum conditions.
