Migration and employment status during the turbulent nineties in Sweden

NET MIGRATION FOR 109 LOCAL LABOUR MARKETS

Out-migration from most of Sweden’s municipalities that, together with a low birth rate,
results in a reduction of the local population is perceived as one of today’s major regional
policy problems. A small number of municipalities are “winners” in this redistribution
process, at least in the sense that they have positive net migration. As indicated elsewhere, it is
not, however, the net migration in itself that makes the decisive difference for a region’s
development, but rather what the gross streams look like. Nonetheless it can be worthwhile to
investigate which factors appear to lie behind them.

The years, which were investigated, are in this case as well 1991, 1993, 1996 and 1997. As is
widely known, these years are highly unlike one another with regard to economic upswings
and downturns and the intensity of regional migration, especially with regard to the
concentration of in-migration to a very few regions. Table 5 gives a summary of the
determining factors for net migration in relation to the various migration categories. The
“explanatory” variables are the same ones used in the earlier estimates, with regard to gross
migration despite to the in-migration/out-migration variables.

Here as well the form of the model is as follows:

InY = ? + ? 1lnX1 + ? 2lnX2 + ............ + ? _nlnX_n

The net migration investigated and reported is as follows:

In to work/out from work

In to studies/out from studies

Total in-migration/total out-migration

These limitations mean that we do not know, for example, in which cases a person migrating
in to work is coming from work, unemployment, studies or “other”. The same applies to those
out-migrating; we do not know whether a person migrating from a job is migrating to another
job or to another category. In the regressions, in to unemployment, out from unemployment, in
to “other” and out to “other” have been excluded due to the fact that far too many small local
labour markets have relatively few migrations between these categories, which makes

13

<<   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   >>

More intriguing information