Throughout many less developed economies
of the world, especially those of
tropical Africa, a curious economic phenomenon
is presently taking place. Despite
the existence of positive marginal products
in agriculture and significant levels of urban
unemployment, rural-urban labor
migration not only continues to exist, but
indeed, appears to be accelerating. Conventional
economic models with their
singular depeindence on the achievement of
a full employment equilibrium through
appropriate wage and price adjustments
are hard put to provide rational behavioral
explanations for these sizable and
growing levels of urban unemployment in
the absence of absolute labor redundancy
in the economy as a whole. Moreover, this
lack of an adequate analytical model to
account for the unemployment phenomenon
often leads to rather amorphous explaniations
such as the "bright lights" of
the city acting as a magnet to lure peasants
into urban areas.