The Well-Being of Cities: Estimating Migration Attractiveness from Internal Migration across Korean Cities

We estimate the migration attractiveness of Korean cities by adopting the methodology proposed by Lee et al. (2021) for internal migration setup. Using bilateral migration data across cities, we measure the overall attractiveness of all Korean cities at the ‘sigun-gu’ level. Our approach has two advantages over traditional methods of measuring a city’s attractiveness. First, it is cost-effective as it uses existing administrative data, unlike subjective surveys that require significant resources. Second, our approach provides a more better assessment of a city’s viability than its population growth rate by considering the costs associated with moving between cities and the origin and destination of each migration. Our results confirm the ongoing regional imbalance, commonly known as “Seoul centralization,” and indicate that the migration attractiveness of rural areas such as Jeollanam-do and Gyeongsangbuk-do is even worse than what is revealed by population growth rates.