The purposes of this paper are: 1) to present a model that intregrates the classical ruralurban migration hypothesis into the utility differential model and 2) to analyze the structure of the recent rural-urban migration.
As is well known the size and the direction of the migration between rural areas and the urban used to coincide with the business fluctuations of the whole economy since the nineteenth century in the western countries¹⁾, which may conveniently be called the classical migration. This phenomenon was also observed in the postwar Japan, at least up to the late 1950's²⁾. A massive one-way inflow of the rural population into the metropolitan areas since then³⁾ however, seems to have led most regional economists to formulations of a variety of hypotheses explaining this urbanization that could be well summarised as the ‘ utility differential hypothesis⁴⁾’. In this process the relationship between the migration and the business cycle came to escape the attention of the students in this field.
In the following we will revisit this long-dismissed relationship and evaluate the legitimacy of the so-called ‘U-turn’ or ‘J-turn’ proposition⁵⁾. Section I presents simple data anlyses and Section II the model. The final section shows some simulation results and findings.