Population, territory and sustainable development

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rural areas. According to the same table, the rural population is older because of migration: in the 2005-
2010 period, migration tended to increase the proportion of older persons by 1.85% in rural areas and
reduce it by 2.3% in cities. As emphasized in earlier studies (Rodríguez and Busso, 2009), this impact is
not due to child-selective rural-urban migration but rather to young-adult selectivity, which has indirect
effects on the proportion of other age groups.
In sum, the results obtained using the 2010 Panama census fully support the statements above on
the effects of rural-urban migration on the gender and age structure in the two areas –effects that
exacerbate these differences between the two areas. For age composition at least, the effect is clearly
favourable for urban areas (in that it reinforces the so-called demographic dividend) and unfavourable for
rural ones.
Migration also tends to be education-selective, although the pattern can have paradoxical effects
in countries with a very large rural-urban education gap. In general, emigrants moving from rural to urban
areas have a higher education level than the inhabitants of rural areas who do not migrate, even after
controlling for age selectivity. It thus tends to act as a deflator of the average education level and
normally is not offset by the higher education level of immigrants from urban areas compared with rural
non-migrants. In short, migration generally tends to reduce the average education level of the rural
population. But it also tends to reduce the education level in urban areas, because migrants from the
countryside have a lower level of schooling than urban non-migrants. These results are confirmed for
Panama using the 2010 census (tables VIII.6 and VIII.7). The two areas show a clear difference in years
of schooling: 11.7 years in urban areas versus 7.1 years in rural areas for the population aged 30 to 49
(table VIII.6) and 10.7 years versus 5.9 years in the case of heads of household (table VIII.7). For both of
these population groups, rural-urban migration reduces the education level in both rural and urban areas.
The relative impact is stronger in rural areas, though, where it reduces the average education level of the
population aged 30 to 49 years by 2% and that of heads of household by 3.4%.
The difference between the two areas holds when the findings are broken down into immigration
and emigration effects. In urban areas, it is immigration that tends to reduce the average education level
(11.67 – 11.76 = –0.09). In rural areas, this effect is the result of emigration (6.98 – 7.25 = –0.27) because
immigration from cities tends to raise the education level in the countryside (7.10 – 6.98 = 0.12).
Table VIII.6
PANAMA: ESTIMATED IMPACT OF RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION ON THE AVERAGE EDUCATION
LEVEL OF THE POPULATION AGED 30 TO 49 IN RURAL AND URBAN AREAS, 2005-2010
Habitual residence
Residence 5 years earlier
Urban Rural Total
Migration impact
(absolute)
Migration impact
(percentage)
Urban 11.76 9.83 11.67 -0.05204 -0.445837
Rural 10.00 6.98 7.10 -0.14456 -2.034652
Total 11.72 7.25 10.28
Source: Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE) - Population Division of ECLAC, on the
basis of special processing of 2010 census microdata.