Benefits driven migration between agricultural and manufacturing sectors: Econophysics modelling via Monte Carlo simulation on Ising spin model

Abstract

In this work, Ising model was employed to investigate the rural-urban migration problem, which reflects the flow of workers between agricultural and manufacturing sectors. The external field and interaction parameters of the model were defined from income difference between sectors and social influences among workers, while the workers were represented by the Ising spins. Monte Carlo simulation was used to perform workers’ sectorial update during the income/social benefits driven migration, where the magnetization-like observables were measured from the difference in number of workers between sectors, and number of workers in each sector. From the results, emergent characteristics that are common in economic developing were found. For instance, workers equally allocate in both sector at low heterogeneity, meaning high temperature in physics, while at high heterogeneity the rural residence dominates due to initial majority effect of the agricultural sector. However, with agricultural to manufacturing production ratio between sectors considered and with increasing the strength of income difference benefit, a sharp migration transition from manufacturing to agricultural sectors is evident at high enough production ratio. This is expected as people tend to move to sector that provides greater benefit. With these results reported, policy maker may use this knowledge to guide the migration by altering the available manufacturing positions as it has the same features as that of the income difference parameter.