Network analysis of urban-to-rural migration

Abstract

Urban-to-rural migration for farming has recently emerged as a new way to vitalize rural economies in a fast-aging rural Korea. In this paper, we analyze the 2013 data of returning farmers with statistical network methods. We identify urban to rural migration hubs with centrality measures and find migration trends based on regional clusters with similar features via statistical network models. We also fit a latent distance model to investigate the role of distance in migration.