The Mortality Transition, Malthusian Dynamics, and the Rise of Poor Mega-Cities

Remi Jedwab and Dietrich Vollrath

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: The largest cities in the world today lie mainly in relatively poor countries, which is a departure from historical experience, when the largest cities were typically found in the richest places. Using new data on the demographic history of the 100 largest mega-cities of today, we establish several new stylized facts distinguishing poor mega-cities from historically rich mega-cities. To account for these facts we develop a model that combines Malthusian models of endogenous population growth with urban models of agglomeration and congestion, and it shows that the absolute growth of the urban population determines whether a city becomes a poor or rich mega-city. We posit that poor mega-cities arose in part because the post-war mortality transition raised their absolute growth above a crucial threshold. Poor mega-cities continue to grow in size but not in living standards because their poverty keeps population growth high. By expanding prior to the mortality transition, historical mega-cities experienced smaller absolute growth that allowed them to sustain wage growth and kept population growth relatively low.

Keywords: Urban Malthusianism; Demographic Regime; Megacities; Congestion; Growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L16 N10 N90 O11 O14 O18 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2015WP/RemiJedwabIIEPWP20156.pdf (application/pdf)

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:gwi:wpaper:2015-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kyle Renner ().