TITLE:
Comparing the Extend of the Spread Effects: Rural-Urban Commuting in Finnish Working Regions
AUTHORS:
Olli Lehtonen, Olli Wuori, Toivo Muilu
KEYWORDS:
Urban-Rural Commuting, Potential Spread Effect, Housing and Commuting Costs, Finland
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.7 No.1,
February
2,
2015
ABSTRACT: It has long been posited
that rural areas can benefit from nearby urban agglomerations through
commuting, and that their development could be a side product of urban growth,
but the results from the sparsely populated regions have not been promising. In
this study, we investigate the possibilities of rural-urban commuting to
support rural development, and explore the spatial ex-tent of the working
regions if jobs are concentrated in the regional centre as indicated by recent
trends. Spread effects are simply operated by an economic possibility to
rural-urban commuting determined by a sum of housing and commuting costs from
disposable income. The results show that the population growth in city regions
does not extend to distant rural areas. It, instead, leads to population losses
in remote areas due to backwash effects as the low disposable incomes encourage
especially low-income households to migrate from remote locations closer to the
centre. The spread effects seem to work only in the limited rural areas located
next to the urban core which encourages the support of remote rural areas
through place-based policy.