Comparing the Extend of the Spread Effects: Rural-Urban Commuting in Finnish Working Regions

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.