Population mobility across regions
Since 2015, within-country migration of people below 30 years old has been almost exclusively concentrated towards metropolitan regions.
Differences in economic opportunities or amenities can drive people to move within a country. The resulting mobility of people has wide-ranging implications for the region affecting the demographic structure of the local population, the labour markets and local housing costs.
Between 2015 and 2018, 33 million people changed their region of residence per year, on average, in the 30 OECD countries with available data. These mobility flows across regions corresponded to 2.5% of the total population in the OECD area. However, regional mobility varied significantly across countries, ranging from around 5% of the total population in Hungary and Korea to less than 0.5% in the Slovak Republic (Figure 4.19).
Inter-regional migration does not affect all regions of a country in the same way. While metropolitan regions and regions near a metropolitan area record significant positive net inflows, other types of regions often face net outflows. In the 27 OECD countries with available data, metropolitan regions and regions near a metropolitan area experienced an average net inflow of 9 and 12 persons per every 10 000 inhabitants between 2015 and 2018 respectively (Figure 4.20). In contrast, regions far from a metropolitan area experienced net outflows of 9 persons, for every 10 000 inhabitants. Looking at individual regions, Sejong (Korea), Parinacota (Chile), and Flagstaff (United States) were the regions with the highest positive net migration rate, corresponding to 12%, 3.8% and 2.8% of the regional population respectively (Figure 4.21). In contrast, during the same period, Trier (Germany), Anchorage (United States) and Noord-Drenthe (Netherlands) experienced net out-migration that corresponded to 12%, 5.1% and 4.2% of the respective regional population.
Mobility of young people (aged from 15 to 29 years) represents more than half of the total within-country migration. In almost all OECD countries for which data is available, young people move almost exclusively to metropolitan regions, as they seek educational and professional opportunities (Figure 4.22). On average, metropolitan regions have captured 95% of within-country youth migration during the last four years. Greece represents an exception to those trends, as regions with small-/medium-sized cities and remote regions actually recorded positive net inflows possibly driven by high youth unemployment that has resulted in young people returning to live with their families.
Data refer to yearly flows of the population from one TL3 region to another TL3 region of the same country. Outflows are represented as the number of persons who left the region the previous year to reside in another region of the same country, while inflows are represented as the number of new residents in the region coming from another region of the same country.
The net migration flow is defined as the difference between inflows and outflows in a region. A negative net migration flow means that more people left the region than entered it.
Young internal migrants are those aged between 15 and 29 years old.
Access to metropolitan areas typology: The proposed classification distinguishes TL3 regions based on the level of access to metropolitan areas (Fadic et al., 2019). To capture the boundaries of metropolitan areas, the classification relies on the concept of FUAs (Dijkstra et al., 2019; OECD, 2012) which are composed of cities and their respective commuting zones.
Source
OECD (2020), OECD Regional Statistics (database), OECD, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/region-data-en.
Reference years and territorial level
2015-18; TL3 or TL3 regions classified according to metropolitan access classification.
Further information
Fadic, M. et al. (2019), “Classifying small (TL3) regions based on metropolitan population, low density and remoteness”, OECD Regional Development Working Papers, No. 2019/06, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b902cc00-en.
Figure notes
Figure 4.19 to Figure 4.21: 4-year average, 2015-18.
Figure 4.22: N-M access to a metro: Non-metropolitan region with access to a metro; N-M access to s/m city: Non-metropolitan region with access to a small/medium city.
