Physical-based models of internal migration

摘要

The use of physical principles as paradigms to model a socioeconomic/demographic phenomenon—the migration of people within a nation—is discussed. In particular, an entropy-maximization model, analogizing migrants to particles interacting through a Lennard-Jones-type potential, is proposed. Certain constraints—dictated by conservation principles and the specific nature of internal-migration data (irregularly coarse-grained configurations of residences at two points of time)—are imposed on the solution. The results of this model can serve as estimates of the probability transition rates employed by Weidlich and Haag in their master-equation approach to the analysis of internal migration.