Making Use of the Consistency of Patterns to Estimate Age-Specific Rates of Inter-Provincial Migration in South Africa

Rob Dorrington, University of Cape Town
Tom A. Moultrie, University of Cape Town

This paper uses a multiplicative component approach and the related log-linear model to present and compare interprovincial migration in South Africa by province of origin, destination, age, sex and race for three periods (1991-1996, 1996-2001 and 2001-2007). This, inter alia, shows a consistency of pattern of migration by age, sex and race with the exception of children under age five (which are prone to undercounting and data scanning errors) which may extend back some 30 years. This consistency permits the estimation of the number of migrants born in the five years prior to the Census from the numbers at older ages. These numbers of migrants are then converted to annual rates of migration and Rogers-Castro multi-exponential curves fitted to these patterns. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these results for projecting future interprovincial migration rates and the generalisability of the findings to other environments.