Early agglomeration or late agglomeration?: Two phases of development with spatial sorting

Rikard Forslid and Toshihiro Okubo

No 11977, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper analyzes different development paths. Developing countries that limit the geographical movement of human capital (and firms) may end up in a different equilibrium path than countries that allow for geographical mobility. At early stages of development (when transportation costs are high), the model has an equilibrium where low-productivity firms concentrate in the large market with abundant human capital, whereas the most productive firms agglomerate to the smaller region with a relatively high endowment of labor. We relate this type of equilibrium to countries in an early stage of development, where industrial productivity in the periphery or small suburban cites can be higher than in the largest mega-cities. As economies develop and transportation costs fall, the model switches to an equilibrium where productive firms concentrate in the larger and human capital rich region. This corresponds to a modern equilibrium where highly productive firms concentrate in the largest and most human capital rich regions as is often seen in many developed countries.

Keywords: Agglomeration; Heterogeneous firms; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11977 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Early Agglomeration or Late Agglomeration? Two phases of development with spatial sorting (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11977

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11977

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().