Exploring Excess Migration in Nordic Rural Municipalities: Pre‐Pandemic Trajectories and Pandemic‐Era Disruption

ABSTRACT Renewed interest in rural areas during the COVID‐19 pandemic generated a sense of optimism concerning the fate of declining rural areas, with the notion of a ‘rural revival’ evident in both popular and academic discourse. While many studies have explored urban–rural migration during the pandemic, few have done so from the specific perspective of declining rural areas. This paper responds to this gap, combining analysis of pre‐pandemic population development trends with an exploration of pandemic‐era internal migration patterns in Nordic rural areas. The paper uses sequence analysis to identify the most typical population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities in the two decades preceding the pandemic. Following this, a measure of ‘excess migration’ is used to explore which types of rural municipalities were the most likely to experience higher‐than‐expected inflows of internal migrants following the onset of the pandemic. The analysis highlights considerable diversity in the population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities—while population decline was the most common experience, it was by no means the only one, with many rural populations stable, and even growing. Further, the paper finds that, while most rural municipalities experienced higher‐than‐expected inflows in the pandemic era, the greatest deviations from expectations were evident in municipalities with the least favourable pre‐pandemic population development trajectories. Further monitoring of migrant flows, along with more detailed analysis of flows among different groups, will be important next steps in clarifying the extent to which these short‐term disruptions have any longer‐term bearing on demographic decline in Nordic rural areas.