Corporate migration has helped, in effect, to hold down labor costs and prices.

Sometimes the corporate migration is only a few counties away.

While technology facilitates corporate migration, so does the growing use of call centers to deal with the public.

"Twenty years ago we saw corporate migration from the city to Fairfield," he said.

And by lowering labor costs, corporate migration serves to keep inflation under control.

My parents were dutiful players in the great corporate migrations of the 1960s and '70s.

The organization's totals cover not only corporate migrations but also the initial investments of newly started companies.

Often overlooked, however, has been the impact of the stepped-up rate of corporate migration, which adds another critical element to the mix.

B1 The corporate migration to Stamford from Manhattan has all but ended, worrying the Connecticut city's leaders.

The old militancy is gone, wrung out of the work force through 20 years of union setbacks, downsizing and corporate migration to cheaper labor markets.

Here on Connecticut's Gold Coast, where scores of company headquarters relocated in the 1970's and early 1980's, the great corporate migration from Manhattan has all but ended.

The corporate migration to Long Island, Westchester, southwestern Connecticut and New Jersey created severe problems in traffic congestion and housing shortages.

Mid-sized cities in the Southeast and Southwest are prime targets of the corporate migration, cities like Charlotte, Memphis, Phoenix and Jacksonville.

Even in these flush times, most workers are accepting modest raises because they are beaten down by global competition, job insecurity, temps, weak unions and corporate migration to lower-wage regions.

Responding to a request for data on corporate migration, the American Management Association polled 63 of its chief executives last month, asking by e-mail whether they intended to relocate their headquarters.

Mr. Berger said he believes the corporate migration from Manhattan will be accelerated in 1990 as businesses continue to flee from such urban problems as crime, drug abuse and high taxes.

Spreading the Jobs Mobility Restrains Wage Momentum The stepped-up corporate migration has spread jobs and living standards more evenly across the country than in some earlier expansions.

"Corporate migration within the United States is definitely accelerating," said Allen J. Scott, a geographer at the University of California at Los Angeles who specializes in economic issues.

But since 1996, corporate migration within the country has soared, roughly doubling to more than 11,000 moves a year, according to Site Selection Magazine of Atlanta, the only organization, public or private, to track the phenomenon.

Those two small colleges, however, are seen as increasingly important to the area's economy's becoming self-sustaining, now that the corporate migration has ended and long-term prosperity appears to depend on smaller businesses that will need a well-educated local population.

Many urban planners, as well as the Citizens Budget Commission and the Regional Plan Association, say that officials in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are squandering public resources by fighting corporate migration.

Janet L. Wells, supervisor for the town of New Castle, which includes Chappaqua, said change seems inevitable at the Reader's Digest headquarters, which was built in 1939 and started a wave of corporate migration to Westchester.