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This article investigates the development of rural migration in northern Sweden (1850–1950). During this period, northern Sweden experienced a slower rate of urbanisation than the rest of the country. This study proposes that decentralised industrialisation (i.e., rural-industrial labour, predominantly in the timber industry) introduced inertia to the urbanisation process by lowering the rate of rural-to-urban migration. Using longitudinal, individual-level data from the county of Västerbotten, the development of migration rates and migrant characteristics is explored via descriptive statistics. The rural population’s development and migration patterns closely correlate to the development of decentralised industrialisation. The results, therefore, indicate that decentralised industrialisation is a viable model for explaining the slow rate of urbanisation in northern Sweden.

The aim of this thesis is to describe and analyze the dynamics of rural migration in northern Sweden,focusing on how these dynamics were influenced by and contributed to societal restructuring from 1850 to2019. During this long time period, rural living went from being the norm to exceedingly more uncommonas Sweden transitioned from an agrarian to a modern industrial and later service-based economy. To asignificant extent, this transition has been fueled by rural-urban migration and has had adverseconsequences for rural areas, particularly in northern Sweden. The study utilizes both historical populationregisters and modern national public authority registers to quantitatively investigate the development ofrural migration through more than a century and a half of societal restructuring. Specifically, the intensity,direction, timing, economic outcomes, and selectivity of migration. The results highlight how regionalspecificities, economic transformations, and structural changes have shaped rural migration patterns innorthern Sweden over time, with effects ranging from the population to the individual level.

Four main migration regimes with distinctive features were discerned by analyzing trends and patterns inrural migration over time. The thesis shows how these regimes have been produced by the interplay betweenthe specific regional conditions found in northern Sweden and the long-term economic and societalrestructuring of the country. A pre-industrial migration regime was dominant up until the late 19th centurywhen the predominantly agricultural economy of Sweden shaped rural migration. This regime wassucceeded by both an early and late industrial regime from the 1880s up until the 1960s, where theincreasing dominance of urban-industrial life and the expansion of the secondary sector of the economystarted to increasingly influence the way in which rural folk moved. From the 1970s onward, what can bestbe described as a post-industrial regime has characterized the northern rural migration, as higher educationand the tertiary sector have increasingly influenced rural migration behavior and outcomes. In essence,rural migration in northern Sweden has been shaped by economic, demographic, institutional, andnormative changes since the mid-19th century. The increasingly urban-centered society has influenced thelife trajectories of rural residents, shaping the migration dynamics in rural areas in incremental steps overthis extended period of time.

This study examines disparities in income levels and employment status between individuals who migrate from rural areas and their siblings who remained in rural settings in Sweden for cohorts born 1960–1984. Utilizing comprehensive Swedish register data, we track the economic outcomes at age 35 or rural residents who migrated between ages 15 and 25, comparing them to non-migrating siblings. Our analysis, employing binomial logit and log-linear models for employment odds and income levels, respectively, reveals that while rural out-migration generally leads to higher income, it does not significantly impact employment status. The study underscores the role of individual and family-specific factors—such as gender and education—and broader time- and place-dependent structures in mediating migration's effects. We find that income disparity between migrants and non-migrants has increased since the 1990s and that the differences increase with the urbanization level of the destination.

In this study, we examine the development of age at leaving the parental household in Sweden between the years 1830-1959. We utilize individual-level longitudinal data from two geographically and socioeconomically different regions: the county of Scania in the very south of Sweden, and Västerbotten to the north. We use descriptive and multivariate analyses to investigate how determinants, such as age at marriage and socioeconomic status, affected the age at leaving the parental household over time and between different subgroups, such as sex and rural-urban setting. We show that the age at leaving the parental household was initially low but increased strongly during industrialization but fell again during the interwar period and onwards. Regional and subgroup differences in age at leaving the parental household were small throughout the investigated period, indicating that the development was general in nature. Therefore, we argue that our results indicate that different models governed the structures and norms of home leaving during our investigated period. More specifically, a pre-industrial model gradually shifted into an industrial model, with the latter one becoming dominant in the 1920s. In the pre-industrial model, leaving home was shaped by the life-cycle service system. In the industrial model, age at marriage instead became a main determinant of home leaving.