ABSTRACT
The 1986 Chinese Migration Survey, in combination with China’s extensive population registration data, offers important new opportunities for the study of internal migration and urbanization and their relationships with economic development in China. This chapter summarizes the urbanization and internal migration experience of four Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Migration is the means by which the human race has settled and exploited the resources of the earth. Any international comparison of migration and urbanization must acknowledge the difficulties in comparing migration data. Migration is usually defined as a population movement of a certain duration that crosses a certain administrative boundary. Early migration patterns were characterized by pioneer movements from Central and East Java to the rural regions of the Outer Islands, especially Sumatra. The Malaysian migration experience is rather unusual in that the rapid increase in population mobility associated with modernization was not accompanied by pronounced rural-to-urban migration flows.
