The impact of spatial spillovers on interprovincial migration in China, 2005–10

In a migration network system, any change of regional characteristics may affect outflows and inflows from and to the region itself and potentially its neighbouring regions. To explore the impact of spatial spillovers on interprovincial migration flows in China, we proposed four spatial autoregressive interaction models by introducing different network structures to gravity models. The results indicate that the model taking account of dependence structure among origins, destinations and flows is more accurate than the other models. Population size is the most critical determinant in interprovincial migration from 2005 to 2010 in China and is greatly strengthened by spatial spillovers.