The land use consequences of rural to urban migration*

Julia Brewer, Ashley Larsen and Frederik Noack

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2024, vol. 106, issue 1, 177-205

Abstract: Rural to urban migration (RUM) is a key component of economic development, but its environmental consequences are not well understood. Here, we study the impacts of RUM on agriculture and land use using household panel data in combination with tree cover data from Uganda. Our results show that the labor loss and the inflow of remittances from RUM lead to a reduction in crop diversity but no shift toward less labor‐intensive crops or crops with a high up‐front investment. In addition to those results at the intensive margin, we find a reduction of cultivated area at the household level, which translates into reduced tree cover loss at the district level. These results suggest an important but nuanced role of RUM for land use change.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12369

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:ajagec:v:106:y:2024:i:1:p:177-205

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().