People mobility, spatial mismatch and rural development

Rural development is being given more attention as spatial mismatch limits rural people’s mobility. This paper builds a complex system to explore factors driving people’s mobility between rural and urban. People’s... [ view full abstract ]

Rural development is being given more attention as spatial mismatch limits rural people’s mobility. This paper builds a complex system to explore factors driving people’s mobility between rural and urban. People’s mobility will be measured by the county-to-county commuting and migration. I establish a framework of spatial mismatch to examine people’s mobility from three perspectives: the spatial mismatch between labor market and human capital, the spatial mismatch between labor market and housing market, and the spatial mismatch between personal demand and local amenities. This paper will estimate the impact of people’s mobility on rural development in terms of city-led development, amenity-led development, and endogenous growth. I consider the interaction of people’s mobility on both origins/residential place and destinations/workplace, and pay more attention on remote rural areas, which are underestimated in the current study.

This paper pairs every two counties to facilitate the analysis of locational attributes and demographic characteristics of both origins/workplaces and destinations/residential places. I have acquired commuting and migration data from Journey to Work dataset and County to County migration and created matrices of mobility between pairs of counties. For demographic characteristics, I will use American Community Survey. For locational attributes, I will use County Business Patterns, and travel distance between all pairs of counties from Google Map API. I find that commuting is a better adjustment of spatial mismatch than migration. I also find that better natural amenity along with more local services (food, retail store) will attract urban migrants. The better local services can also absorb local labor and generally reduce rural out-commuters and out-migrants. Well-developed high paid service industry and information industry could attract metro county migrants and decrease rural out-commuters to adjacent metro counties.