An Explanatory Model of City-size Distribution: Evidence from Cross-country Data

Gershon Alperovich
Additional contact information
Gershon Alperovich: Department of Economics, Bar-llan University, 52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel

Urban Studies, 1993, vol. 30, issue 9, 1591-1601

Abstract: This paper utilises data from files of the World Bank to investigate the relevancy of a wide set of variables in explaining systematic variations of city-size distribution across countries. The Pareto exponent is employed as a measure of population concentration among cities of different sizes. The empirical results allow us to confirm a number of hypotheses. High degrees of economic development as measured by per capita GNP foster urban dispersal. Conversely, high degrees of government involvement in the economy and prevalence of significant scale and agglomeration economies promote urban concentration. Like most other cross-sectional studies, this study does not provide support to a dominating view in the economic development literature that at low levels of development the relation between economic development and population concentration is negative while at high levels the relation reverses and becomes positive.

Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420989320081521 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:urbstu:v:30:y:1993:i:9:p:1591-1601

DOI: 10.1080/00420989320081521

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().