Migrations ville-campagne et chômage : un test d'interdépendance

Abstract

A test of interdependence between urban-rural migrations and unemployment. A considerable amount of migrations appears to be economically motivated. The behavior of individuals at the micro level is not only an expression of preferences but reflects their situations vis-a-vis the labor market. In particular, the problem of correlation between unemployment and migration is always raised but it is often evacuated by lack of suitable data. We present here a straightforward statistical method, relied on multivariate counting processes theory, which allows to study the interdependence between two couples of states : to be or not to be unemployed, to reside in an urban or a rural area. We use an adapted test procedure which compares two "parallel" transitions intensities to point out significative differences between the couples of transitions and then to detect the interaction between participation and migration processes. In an application to data from the INSEE Training-Professionnal Qualification survey of 1985, we find that the urban or rural localization affects heavily the probability of falling unemployed with a significantly higher "risk" in town. On the opposite, the exit from unemployment does not depend on the localization. We improve the accuracy of our results by splitting our sample into respectively men or women and young or older people, as the various transitions are very inequally distributed among ages and sexes.