Where to create jobs to reduce poverty: cities or towns?

Should job creation be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this question, we develop an equilibrium model of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, small town and big city. We develop sufficient statistics for policy decisions based on the parameters of the model. The empirical remit of the theoretical model is illustrated with long running panel data from Kagera, Tanzania. Further, we show that the structure of the sufficient statistics is maintained in the case where the model is generalized to introduce heterogeneous workers and jobs.

Publication year:2019

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

BOF-publication weight:1

CSS-citation score:1

Authors:International

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open