ABSTRACT
This chapter examines rural-urban migration during the communist era in Bulgaria in an effort to determine its general characteristics and motivations, its impact on rural, urban, and regional development, and some of the problems involved in describing these flows by use of models of spatial interaction. The pull aspect of migration, of course, is found in the economic, social, and cultural opportunities of growing cities of Bulgaria. Bulgarian statistical sources use several broad categories to determine the changes and relative importance of the reasons underlying migration. A comparison of the relative importance of the sources of urban population growth reveals that rural-urban migration has accounted for over one-half of the population expansion of Bulgarian towns, which is almost twice as great as the natural-increase share and more than double the legal gains. In addition to labor surplus and deficit regions, a few okrugs have a high degree of self-sufficiency in employment-oriented migration from villages to towns.
