The National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI) of Peru and the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE)-Population Division of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) today released the study Peru: Internal migration and mobility to study and work in five metropolitan areas, 2007 and 2017, a document that is part of a solid history of technical collaboration between the two institutions.
The report quantifies and analyzes the levels, patterns, and effects of migration and daily mobility for study and work in five metropolitan areas of Peru, which were selected based on four attributes: population and economic size; historical relevance; representation of the three natural regions of the country (Coast, Sierra, and Jungle); and extension of four or more districts to be able to capture intra-metropolitan movements. Considering all these criteria together, the areas studied were Lima (Coast), Arequipa (Sierra), Trujillo (Coast), Cusco (Sierra), and Iquitos (Jungle).
This is the third report carried out by both institutions. The first two were Peru: Internal migrations and sociodemographic dynamics of departments, provinces and districts in the first two decades of the 21st century (May 2022) and Peru: Internal migration and daily mobility for work and study between cities, 2007 and 2017 (July 2023).
Unlike previous studies, this new document focuses on travel within metropolitan areas, paying particular attention to movements between the different districts that comprise them. In addition, in some cases, extra-metropolitan exchange is also considered, that is, the exchange of each district with the districts of the rest of the country.
The report is novel for several reasons. First, because there are still no studies on migration and mobility to study and work on specific metropolitan areas with a focus on intra-metropolitan areas. Second, the relationship between these displacements and their effects and the processes of spatial, socioeconomic and demographic restructuring of metropolitan areas is of great relevance in all theories on metropolitan configuration and change. However, this relationship had never been empirically investigated in metropolitan areas in Peru. Third, the advanced methodological procedures used in the two previous studies are applied in an innovative way to estimate the effect of intra-metropolitan mobility to study and work on the composition of the population of the districts in school and work hours. And fourth, because it includes disaggregations of social indicators linked to different expressions of inequality, such as socioeconomic, ethnic and gender.
The document also offers several findings that contribute to a better understanding of the functioning and transformations of the metropolitan areas studied, and of the residential and daily trajectory of people. One of these concerns intra-metropolitan migration, which was intense until 2017, involving more than 1 million people in the five metropolitan areas analysed in the reference period of the 2017 Census, that is, 2012-2017. In some metropolitan areas, 10.0% or more of their population changed their district of residence in the two observation periods (2002-2007 and 2012-2017).
In the case of mobility for study and work, the findings refer exclusively to the 2017 Census, the first to include these questions. The 2017 census questionnaire only captures the district of origin and destination, but it still allows us to see the enormous magnitude of this mobility, which in some cities such as Lima reaches almost 2.5 million people in the case of mobility for work.
Add Comment