Why do large cities tend to attract more migrants than smaller towns? Discuss in the light of conditions in developing countries.

Why the large city attracts more migrants

Agglomeration is the dry word for a thick labour market. A big city offers many employers, so a lost job is not the end. Informal work — construction, street trade, domestic service, gig tasks — still pays more, in expectation, than a slack village. Harris–Todaro taught that people migrate on expected urban income, even if open unemployment exists, because the prize of a formal job is high. Cumulative causation then runs. Each newcomer spends. That spending creates another stall. The stall then calls another relative.

Public goods are skewed. Tertiary hospitals, universities, courts, airports and English-medium coaching sit in metros. In developing countries the small town often has a bus stand and a weak municipality. It often does not have a functioning industrial estate. Networks lower risk. A chawl, a jhuggi, a language cluster, a church or a caste lodge is an arrival kit that a small town rarely matches at scale.

• Jobs: Diverse formal markets and thick informal markets beat a single mill town.
• Services: Education and specialist health are metropolitan.
• Chain migration: Information and credit travel along kin, so the big city reproduces itself.

Developing-country conditions

Colonial and post-colonial transport was built to ports and capitals. Import-substituting industry and then services and IT clustered where power, ports and the state already were. Rural distress — tiny holdings, monsoon risk, agrarian underemployment — pushes people out. The metro pulls them in. Land and housing shortages create slums, but slums are still a foothold. Small towns may grow, yet they often lack water, sewage, colleges and non-farm jobs. They therefore become stepping stones, or they are skipped.

Gender and youth matter. Young men enter construction. Young women enter garments, care and BPO. Both groups target large labour markets. Climate shocks and conflict add pulses of movement toward the city that can absorb people, even if it absorbs them badly.

• Primacy: One or two cities dominate national urban population in many poor and middle-income states.
• Informality: The shock-absorber is the unorganised sector, not a Western welfare city.
• Policy skew: Investment, elite schools and tertiary care follow the large city. That city then looks even more rational to the next migrant.

The small town will attract more people only when it offers a credible bundle of work and services. Until then, developing-country migration is a choice for the metro. It is not a failure of rural character.