Internal migration and urban employment in the Third World

For over 10 years, Michael Todaro's (1969) model has provided a widely recognized theoretical framework for explaining the massive rural-urban migration observed in many third world nations. Data gathered from a broad range of nations is presented in order to point out a critical shortcoming of that model. It is shown that, far from being general in nature, the Todaro approach is limited to explaining the movement of people who possess enough human capital to qualify them for modern sector employment. Large numbers of relatively uneducated people migrate and work in a subsistence world that the structures of Todaro's theory cannot explain. The analysis presented takes the perspective of the urban subsistence sector to develop a model that functions as a useful complement to Todaro's model. The analysis is based on the recognition of rural-urban migration as a dual phenomenon. Migrants possessed of the requisite human capital will move to the urban modern sector, while those who are less well endowed are bound for employment in the urban subsistence sector.