Urbanisation Patterns: European vs Less Developed Countries

Diego Puga

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We develop a model in which the interaction between transport costs, increasing returns, and labour migration across sectors and regions creates a tendency for urban agglomeration. Demand from rural areas favours urban dispersion. European urbanisation took place mainly in the XIX Century, with higher costs of spatial interaction, weaker economics of scale, and less elastic supply of labour to the urban sector than in LDCs today. These factors, together with a bias in the transport networks of LDCs towards serving larger cities, could help explain why European countries have developed balanced urban systems while primate cities dominate in LDCs.

Date: 1996-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/DP0305.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Urbanisation patterns: European vs less developed countries (1996)
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:cep:cepdps:dp0305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().