Fertility adaptation by rural-urban migrants in developing countries: The case of Korea

Summary The purpose of this study is to develop and test a model to assess the influence of rural-urban migration on fertility in less developed countries. Two major reasons may account for lower fertility levels observed among such migrants than among women who remained in rural areas: a selection effect, and adaptation to constraints in the area of destination. Results of previous studies have only rarely suggested that the effect of adaptation was significant. We use the detailed personal migration and pregnancy histories recorded in the Korean World Fertility Survey of 1974 and an autoregressive model to control for unobservable variations in personal preferences for different family sizes between migrants and non-migrants. Our study provides evidence that adaptation following rural-urban migration is a significant factor which explains the lower fertility of rural-urban migrants compared with that of rural stayers.