Abstract
Internal migration is an institutionalised process; it is affected not only by economic factors but also by institutional forces. This study thus employs institutional theory to investigate the importance of regional informal institutions and local governance quality on types of migration, as well as their impacts on migrants' earnings. Examining a set of national internal migration data in Vietnam, we find that pure socialist regions (the north) attract in-migration for job-seeking purposes while pre-capitalist regions (the south) attract in-migration for business-opportunity-seeking purposes. More importantly, migration across regions with dissimilar informal institutions yields adverse effects on migrants' earnings. Finally, migration from regions with a lower governance quality to regions with a higher governance quality improves migrants' earnings.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Regional studies |
| Early online date | 14 Sept 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 14 Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Funding Information: This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 502.01-2020.01. The authors would like to thank the Editor and the two Reviewers for the sharp and constructive feedback. All errors remain ours.
Keywords
- Internal migration
- Informal institutions
- Local governance quality
- Migration purposes
- Vietnam