Population Dispersal from Major Metropolitan Regions: An International Comparison

Of the eighteen countries studied in this paper, eleven (Japan, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Denmark, New Zealand, Belgium, France, West Germany, East Germany, and The Netherlands) show either a reversal in the direction of net population flow from their sparsely populated, peripheral regions to their densely populated core regions or a drastic reduction in the level of this net flow. In the first seven of these eleven countries, this reversal or reduction became evident only in the 1970s; in the last four, its onset was recorded m the 1960s. Six countries (Hungary, Spain, Finland, Poland, South Korea, and Taiwan) have yet to show an attenuation in the movement of persons into their most densely populated regions. Some possibly unreliable British data likewise fail to reveal a slackening in the "drift south" of the British population. Three additional discoveries described in this paper are the following: (1) Migration continues strong into the capital regions of the three Eastern European countries studied here (Poland, Hungary, and East Germany). However, the low natural increase of these regions has blunted their expansion. (2) Though domestic migration into the capital regions of France, Sweden, and Norway has declined dramatically, foreign immigration into these regions remains at a high level. (3) Net domestic migration into the core regions of Sweden, Japan, and Italy, countries separated by vast distances, fluctuate from year to year in a remarkably similar manner.