HOW STICKY IS URBANWARD MIGRATION - EVIDENCE FOR THE UNITED-STATES, 1850-1980

Estimates of what the urban growth rate would have been if labor had been perfectly mobile and responsive to differences in the growth rates of urban and rural opportunity enable the “stickiness” of urbanward migration to be measured. Before the second world war, there was substantial unrealized long-wave cyclicality: the U.S. urban growth was much less “boom and busty” than it might have been. Since 1950 observed and predicted urban growth rates have tracked each other closely, however, suggesting that as global mobility has increased and institutional constraints have been relaxed via successive immigration reforms there will be far less difference between the longer-run rates of urban and economic growth than heretofore. © 1991 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.