In all cases, the proportion of migrating males is higher than their proportion as heads of households in both regions.

Race is also important (Table 3.3). White people are the predominant racial class for NE-SE migrants. This contrasts SE-NE migration, which is led by non-whites, . In recent years, however, the predominance of whites in NE-SE migration has fallen and whites now represent less than half of the migrant stream. The number of NE mulattos and blacks migrating to the SE is growing in recent years relative to other segments of the migrant population. The racial distribution of migrant flows follows, to some extent, the distribution of races in the receiving regions. The NE is predominantly non-white, while whites are the most common racial group in the SE. Whites are also predominantly less poor than non-whites at a regional level as well as national level (Fiess and Vemer, 2001).

**Educational Attainment of Migrants Matters** People in the Southeast tend to be better educated than people in the Northeast. Average years of schooling for the total population in the Southeast was 6.2 years in 1999 compared to 3.9 years in the Northeast (Table 3.3).4 This pattern is weakly reinforced by migration patterns. People who recently migrated from the Northeast to.the Southeast tend to be better educated than people who move from the Southeast to the Northeast (see Table 6). NE-SE migrants who moved in the last 5 years had an average of 5.4 years of schooling, compared to 4.5 years for SE-NE migrants. Furthermore, migrants.into the NE are far better-educated than the general NE population, and migrants that arrive in the SE have education levels that are lower than those of the SE population. While the difference in education between migrants to the two regions might appear quite small, it should be viewed within a regional context. One should therefore keep regional differences in education in mind when assessing the impact of education on migration.

**Urban-Rural Location** About 95 percent of people migrating from the NE to the SE end up in urban areas, while migration from the SE to the NE is less predominately urban in its destination. About 30 percent of ever migrated SE-NE migrants end up in rural areas, and more recently the trend toward SE-NE rural migration has increased. In 1991, 36 percent of SE-NE migrants settled in rural areas, but this figure increased in 1999 to 38 percent.<sup>5</sup> Without more information on the immediate location decisions of

> 4 Fiess and Verner (2001) point out that in 1996 the literacy rate in the Northeast had not even reached the level of literacy of the Southeast of 1970 and further, that in 1998 the average effective education of the poor in Sao Paulo (5.1 years) nearly equaled the average effective education of the non-poor in Rio Grande do Norte (5.2 years).

> 5 Note that the PNAD 1999 only provides information that a person that migrated, e.g., in 1991 from the Southeast to the Northeast currently lives in a rural areas. We do not know if this person settled in 1991 in a rural area; table 5 compares current residence of people who migrated in each year by year of migration. Over time, if there is a general trend toward rural to urban migration within states, we would expect the marginal share of inter-state migrants who locate in urban areas to exceed the average (which is indeed what we observe).

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