Recent migration patterns in the developed world: a clarification of some differences between our and IIASA's findings.

This is a reply to 2 recently published critiques of our finding of a discontinuity in the recent internal migration patterns of Europe, Japan, and N America. Using data from the IIASA Human Settlements Systems Task, Hall-Hay and Gordon both fail to detect any significant narrowing in the differential between the growth rates of metropolitan areas and the growth rates of rural areas in Europe and Japan over the period 1950-1970. Our rejoinder consists of a clarification of our own independent research on regional population change in these same countries. Unlike the IIASA project, this research has been confined, in the case of Europe and Japan, to a study of the trends in net internal migration to their politically and economically dominant core regions, for which data are available for the post-1970 period as well. Most of the disagreement over the presence or absence of a discontinuity in the regional population trends in the countries of western Europe and Japan can be explained by this simple difference in the principal orientations of the 2 studies, the first towards all metropolitan areas in these countries for the period 1950-1970, and emphasizing the total population growth of these areas, the other towards their densest, richest, and generally most important regions for the longer period 1950-1980, and emphasizing net internal migration to these regions rather than their overall population growth. -from Authors