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3 days ago
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13 Jun, 2025
Today on Smaller, I want to highlight two countries that have tried to encourage migration from dense urban centers (where starting a family is hard) to secondary metropolitan areas (where, theoretically it might be easier).
First, Italy which is trying to reverse years of relative underinvestment and underdevelopment by extending services and rail links from the north to the poorer South of the country:
Italy's south, known as the "Mezzogiorno", is in dire need of a lift. In the 10 years to 2022 almost 200,000 young graduates left the southern regions for central and northern Italy and a further 138,000 moved abroad, the latest Svimez data shows.
The think-tank has forecast that by 2080, the south will lose over 8 million residents -- its share of the total Italian population falling to 25.8% from 33.8% at present. Giuseppe Cirillo, head of the fast-speed project for FS infrastructure unit RFI, said the new link could stem the exodus.
"Activating the line is crucial, especially for all those inland areas and villages that have been suffering severe depopulation in recent years," he told Reuters.
The line should allow people to keep living in their small hometowns and commute to larger cities to work, rather than uproot as they now have to do, he said.
Second, Korea first conceived Sejong City in 2003 as a new administrative capital of the country, in an attempt to move more government functions (and therefore, jobs and opportunities) out of Seoul, while retaining transportation links. A side effect of this population transfer is that cheaper, smaller Sejong has a far higher birth rate that Seoul.
This five-year-old city, slated to be South Korea’s new administrative capital, has something in abundance that the rest of the country doesn’t—kids.
For three years in a row, women in newly constructed Sejong have had more children, on average, than anywhere else in the country. That’s no small feat at a time when Korea is battling a “birth strike,” with both births and marriages shrinking to all-time lows.
During and immediately after the COVID pandemic there was increasing acceptance of remote work among US employers. This led some remote workers to perform a sort of geographic arbitrage, taking their salaries to parts of the country with lower housing costs (and general costs of living). Several smaller cities in the west became "Zoomtowns" - places where workers could migrate and finally buy a home while teleworking. At the time it suggested that this might help resolve the homeownership crisis among young millennials and GenZ, while giving new life to depopulated areas of the country. However, the rollback of remote work policies has made this outcome unlikely - for now. Policymakers should reconsider, as internal migration could solve two problems at once.
