Crossing the Divide examines the nature, causes, and consequences of population movements between the rural and urban sectors of developing countries. Using nationally representative, micro-level data from seventy-five countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean over the course of several decades, Robert E.B. Lucas provides the most comprehensive and definitive treatment of internal migration currently available.

"This accessible and topical book offers insights to policy makers in both industrialized and developing countries as well as to scholars and researchers of economics, development, international relations and to specialists in migration."--BOOK JACKET.

Net displacement of toxic intensity toward developing countries may not have been inevitable in the last two decades. And toxic industrial migration seems to have been the result of restrictive trade policies in the developing countries themselves more than of regulatory cost differences between the North and the South.

Would free trade result in greater and more rapid environmental degradation for developing countries? Less protection of their domestic industrial chemical industries would reduce the pollution-intensity of their manufacturing sector - but merely relocating firms that emit globally damaging toxins clearly misses the point.