Migration and Urbanization in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Bakker, Jan David ; Parsons, Christopher ; Rauch, Ferdinand

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: URBANIZATION;    MIGRATION;    ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY;    NATURAL EXPERIMENT;    BLACK POPULATION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8764
RP-ID  :  WPS8764

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Although Africa has experienced rapidurbanization in recent decades, we know little about theprocess of urbanization across the continent. The paperexploits a natural experiment, the abolition of SouthAfrican pass laws, to explore how exogenous populationshocks affect the spatial distribution of economic activity.Under apartheid, black South Africans were severelyrestricted in their choice of location and many were forcedto live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheidthey were free to migrate. Given a migration cost indistance, a town nearer to the homelands will receive alarger inflow of people than a more distant town followingthe removal of mobility restrictions. Drawing upon thisexogenous variation, the authors study the effect ofmigration on urbanization in South Africa. While they findthat on average there is no endogenous adjustment ofpopulation location to a positive population shock, there isheterogeneity in these results. Cities that start off largerdo grow endogenously in the wake of a migration shock, whilerural areas that start off small do not respond in the sameway. This heterogeneity indicates that population shockslead to an increase in urban relative to rural populations.Overall, the evidence suggests that exogenous migrationshocks can foster urbanization in the medium run.