Inter-provincial migration in Spain: temporal trends and age-specific patterns

The geographical pattern of population redistribution through internal migration in Spain in the 1980s was significantly different from that apparent in the two previous decades. Changes have occurred in response to processes of industrial restructuring, political reform and social changes, including the desire by some former out-migrants to return to their origins. This paper provides interpretation of the changing patterns of internal migration in Spain at the inter-provincial scale, and new analysis of age-specific migration during the 1980s using a 10% sample of anonymised records from the 1991 census. Schedules of age-specific gross migration rates are constructed and classified according to their shape and level relative to the national schedule, and the relationships between in-migration and out-migration rates are examined for four selected age groups to demonstrate how aggregate patterns of inter-provincial migration conceal a wide diversity of age-specific experience.