Which factors can negatively influence people to leave rural areas?

Push factors are conditions or circumstances that drive individuals to leave rural areas and move to urban settings. These can include a lack of job opportunities, inadequate access to services such as healthcare and education, poor infrastructure, and limited economic activities. When rural areas face challenges like declining agricultural profitability, high poverty rates, or natural disasters, residents may seek better living conditions and employment prospects elsewhere, often in cities where these opportunities are more abundant.

In contrast, economic development and pull factors generally attract individuals to urban areas rather than encourage them to leave rural locations. Economic development can lead to improvements that might keep people in rural areas or draw them to urban environments. Natural increase refers to the difference between birth rates and death rates and is not a direct reason for migration in this context. Therefore, push factors accurately represent the elements that negatively influence people’s decisions to migrate from rural to urban areas.