Analyzing Internal Migration to Antalya and Mugla through Gravity Modelling

Antalya and Mugla provinces located in southwestern Turkey recently emerged as new magnets for internal migration. In an earlier study, we had pointed out that the dynamics underlying migration to these two provinces differs in many respects from that fueling the population movements to traditional magnets. In this paper, we complement our previous findings by showing how in some other key respects, migration to Antalya and Mugla is similar to migration to traditional destinations. We accomplish this by estimating separate gravity models for the two provinces in question, using both OLS and robust regression methods. We find that migration to Antalya and Mugla is affected by distance from the origin adversely, and by unemployment differential between the origin and destination, past migration from the origin, population sizes at the origin and destination, and natural disasters at the origin, favorably.