Rural inhabitants’ perception of better life changes when
observing the success of other people, and hope to emulate their
success. They know that University degree can lead to a higher
expected income. In fact urbanism has some benefits but the costs
(pollution, congestion, and crime) are also pervasive in developing
countries. In order to better understand the problem, and
examine policy measures for controlling its negative externalities,
it is of importance to study and analyze the factors which may
affect migration. Therefore, in this study we investigated this
important issue with emphasis on the effect of rural literacy level
on rural-urban migration by using an Auto-Regressive
Distributed Lag (ARDL) model utilizing time-series data related
to the years 1959-2005 in Iran. Results indicate that in long term,
rural literacy level has the most effect on this function. It was also
found that, 1% increase in rural wage, urban wage, rural value
added and rural literacy level can cause 0.25% decrease, 0.32%
increase.