Causes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation in Zambia: Natural population increase or migration?

Abstract

This article addresses the debate over the causes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation in Zambia: Are urbanisation and counter-urbanisation caused mostly by net migration or are they caused mostly by the natural growth or decline of the urban population? Using population censuses, we apply the intercensal forward survival ratio method to measure net migration and the natural population growth of urban and rural areas in 1990, 2000 and 2010. The results show that the most important cause of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation was net migration rather than natural urban population growth or decline. Although natural urban population growth was roughly twice that of net migration, this had very little influence on urbanisation because it was matched by the natural growth of the rural population. We also address the causes of migration by examining employment trends. These results indicate that economic decline during the 1990s resulted in decreased urban employment and a dramatic rise in urban unemployment, which in turn caused migration from urban to rural areas. Conversely, during the 2000s, absolute employment grew and unemployment decreased, which corresponded with increased rural–urban migration (resulting in net urbanisation). Our findings also show that even during the period of net out-migration from urban areas and high urban unemployment levels, the resident urban-born workforce continued to grow strongly through natural increase. Thus, these results also show that urban population growth can increase substantially in the absence of urban economic growth, thereby increasing urban unemployment and urban–rural migration.

Migration and fuel use in rural Zambia

“…According to the most recent census, urban areas accounted for 39.5% of the population in 2010, up from 34.7% in 2000 (IOM 2019: 48). Net rural-urban migration explains this shift in population (Crankshaw & Borel-Saladin, 2019).…”

Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Population-Land-Economic Urbanization and Its Impact on Urban Carbon Emissions in Shandong Province, China

“…The themes of these studies include theoretical discussion on new-type urbanization [15], financing risks and financial system establishment of new-type urbanization [16,17], green and healthy development of newtype urbanization [18], new-type urbanization and regional synergistic development [19], and global impacts of new-type urbanization [20]. The second aspect is the tendency of PLEU and the interaction between them, including population migration and urban-rural integration [21], the impact of urbanization on residents' health [22], the causal relationship between population urbanization and land urbanization [23], and the mechanism of population urbanization and economic growth [24]. In addition, the impact of population growth and urbanization on agricultural risk [25] and monitoring of urban land expansion using remote sensing technology [26] are also key research themes.…”

Migratory Outflow from Wrocław: Directions of Population Flows within the Framework of Internal Migration in the Period 2002–2018

“…Kupiszewski et al 1998;Szymańska, Biegańska 2011;Winiarczyk-Raźniak, Raźniak 2012;Pytel 2017;Gałka, Warych-Juras 2018;Popjakova et al 2018) and counter-urbanisation (e.g. Grzeszczak 2000;Bijker, Haartsen 2012;Crankshaw, Borel-Saladin 2019). In this context, large cities in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe that underwent a political transformation in the 1990s constitute a special case, including the ensuing socio-economic changes (market-oriented growth) that drove the second phase of urban sprawl in the region.…”