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Deciphering the Relationship Between Internal Migration and Regional Disparities in Tunisia

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Abstract

This study analyses the key factors that shape inter-governorates migration in Tunisia, focusing mainly on the role of demographic, geographical and socio-economic factors in driving migration flows. It uses basic and extended gravity models, as well as Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood model for modeling migration data to assess the relative importance of distance, job market characteristics and economic variables. The main findings reveal that inter-governorate migrations in Tunisia are affected by high population size at the origin and destination locations, high unemployment rate at the origin and low unemployment rate at the destination. The results suggest also that migration flows are negatively affected by high job vacancies and the annual average per capita household expenditure at the origin.

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Notes

  1. In the 2004 Census report, internal migrant is defined as any person who have moved from a delegation to another. We haven't adopted this definition in the current study because of unavailability of data at this scale.

  2. Migration is measured over the reference period of five years: 1999–2004 for census 2004, 2004–2009 for the mini-census survey of 2009 aimed to update the census database, and 2009–2014 for the census 2014.

  3. www.gadm.org.

  4. Other alternative measures of distance were used in the empirical studies such as the road distance, the travel time and the population weighted centroids. Garcia et al. (2014) concludes that there are no significant differences between these measures.

  5. Models that describe and predict the numbers of migrations between two regions as a function of attributes of the locations of origin, the attributes of the locations of destination and the friction of distance between them are often called spatial interaction models (Rogers 2015, p. 8).

  6. The gravity model as originally formulated (naive gravity model) expresses migration from \(i\) to \(j\) (\(M_{ij}\)) as a function of population of \(i\) (\(P_{i}\)), population of \(j\) (\(P_{j}\)), and the inverse of the distance (\(D_{ij}\)) between \(i\) and \(j\): \(M_{ij} = \frac{{\alpha P_{i} P_{j} }}{{D_{ij} }}\), where \(\alpha\) is a constant.

  7. World Development Indicators.

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out with the support of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences—“Inequality, Mobility and Development in the Arab Region” Third Round (2015–2016) and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida. The authors would especially like to thank Dr. Abdelkader Latreche, population expert at the permanent population committee of the Ministry of developmental planning and Statistics in Qatar, who supported this research proposal from the onset.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Higher School of Economic and Commercial Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis, 4 Rue Abou Zakaria El Hafsi, 1089, Montfleury, Tunis, Tunisia

    Mohamed Amara

  2. Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management of Sousse, University of Sousse, B.P. 307, Erriadh Street, 4023, Sousse, Tunisia

    Hatem Jemmali

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  1. Mohamed Amara
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  2. Hatem Jemmali
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Correspondence to Mohamed Amara.

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Amara, M., Jemmali, H. Deciphering the Relationship Between Internal Migration and Regional Disparities in Tunisia. Soc Indic Res 135, 313–331 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1487-y

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