Economy
As Swedish Cities Draw the Young and Educated, Can Rural Areas Survive?
Most young people in Sweden leave for the city and never go home, a new study finds.
Big cities are a big draw for Swedish college grads, perhaps even more so than their American peers. But as educated young people in that country head to cities in droves, can smaller rural places survive? A recent study by my colleague Charlotta Mellander and Lina Bjerke published in Annals of Regional Studies takes a close look.
The study uses extraordinarily detailed data which enabled the researchers to track the location choices of everyone who graduated from university in 2001 across all 290 Swedish regions. They then sorted Swedish college graduates from 2001 into two groups: those who lived in rural areas and those who lived in urban areas before going university.