Introduction
There is no significant rural-urban migration in Myanmar. This is mainly because full-scale industrialization was not implemented during the 25 years of socialist regime or even after the 20 years of economic transition.The country's economic structure has barely changed over the past 45 years and the capacity of the urban sector (industry as well as service) to absorb labour remains inadequate.
Nevertheless, the limited rural-urban migration does not signify that rural Myanmar is static with no population movement.We consider the following two population flows as being prominent since the start of economic transition in the late 1980s.
One is overseas migration, which is rapidly increasing. The number of Myanmar migrants working on fishing boats, in factories, and at construction sites in Thailand has increased dramatically since around the mid-1990s (Bradford and Vicary 2005).Myanmar labourers are also working at ports and in factories in Malaysia.majority are fully aware of the severe working conditions in the destination countries, there is no end to the people who wish to migrate and are willing to pay exorbitant fees to migration brokers.
The other population flow is intrarural migration.Previous research on domestic migration from an economic standpoint is limited, with the exception of a study by Takahashi (1997).Takahashi conducted a field survey in 1993-95 and found that 20% of the village population had been replaced. First, the major class of people migrating were non-farmers, especially agricultural labourers who do not own any farmland or other assets. As pointed out in many studies, there is a large pool of agricultural labourers in rural Myanmar (Saito 1986; Takahashi 1992, 2000;