Rural Development And Migration : A Study Of Family Choices In The Philippines

This study focuses on family, village, and community variation in out-migration in the Philippines and identifies key economic and social demographic factors at these various levels of analysis. It places migration in the broader developmental processes emerging in rural places.

Perhaps because I grew up on a farm in Ohio, I have long been interested in rural development. Although I fll''St became a migrant at the age of 17 when I left the farm to continue my studies in a city college, I was not aware of the relation between rural development and migration until many years later when I began studying patterns of urban and rural poverty. This research has grown out of my continuing investigation of the ways that migration .has been seen as both a response to chronic conditions of rural poverty and a factor potentially exacerbating urban poverty conditions. If governments wanted to deal with urban poverty, they would want to restrict urban in-migration, yet if they reduced urban in-migration, this would remove one of the important means available to persons seeking to raise themselves out of rural impoverishment. This would clearly be a no-win situation for the rural poor; the only way to deal fairly with both urban and rural poverty would be to foster socio-economic development of rural areas. Thus, I became interested in studying the patterns of rural development which actually have had an effect on the migration decisions of rural families.