Does Regional Economic Growth Depend on Proximity to Urban Centres?

Rudiger Ahrend and Abel Schumann
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Abel Schumann: OECD

No 2014/7, OECD Regional Development Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper analyses the spatial patterns of regional economic growth in Europe over the 1995 to 2010 period. It finds that regions, which contain large urban agglomerations, have been growing significantly faster than those that do not. Furthermore, proximity to large urban agglomerations has been positively correlated to economic growth. Halving travel time to a large urban agglomeration is associated with a 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points increase in annual per capita growth. More generally, the study also shows that measures of population density are positively correlated to growth. Among the different measures, by far the best predictor of growth between 1995 and 2010 is the maximum population density of a region.

Keywords: population distribution and economic growth; regional growth; spatial distribution of economic activity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-07-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro, nep-sbm and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:govaab:2014/7-en

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