Population redistribution in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1990s
Alisson
F.
Barbieri, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, barbieri@email.unc.edu
(Presenting)
Richard
E.
Bilsborrow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, richard_bilsborrow@unc.edu
Following the opening of roads and large-scale in-migration into the Northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1970s, the most dramatic forms of population redistribution under way are currently within this frontier area. Rural-urban and rural-rural migration has engendered one of the highest rates of deforestation of any Amazonian nation, and an incipient, but growing urbanization in the Ecuadorian Amazon. However, while very significant in its effects on deforestation, urbanization and regional development, population mobility in the Amazon has hardly been studied at all. Based on a longitudinal data of 249 farm households between 1990 and 1999, this paper uses a multinomial regression model to understand what factors affect rural out-migration to rural or urban destinations. The results show important differentials between rural-rural and rural-urban migrants due to farm household life cycle effects, with rural-rural migration being more responsive to changes in the amount of farmland in forest, and to the number of adults and children living in the farm household. On the other hand, rural-urban migration is associated to changes in the proportion of land in pasture and number of children in the farm household. Important differentials among rural-rural and rural-urban migrants are also explained by human capital characteristics (education and off-farm experience), road accessibility to farms, to changes in farm size, and age and gender of out-migrants. Identifying and measuring these differentials is important to understand the effects of policy-relevant variables on the choice of a particular migration destination.