Agglomeration Index : Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration
By H. Uchida, Andrew Nelson. 2010
229 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of ‘urban’, resulting in inconsistencies. This situation is particularly troublesome if one wishes to conduct a cross-country analysis or determine the aggregate urbanization status of the regions (such as Asia or Latin America) and the world. This paper proposes an alternative to the UN measure of urban concentration that we call an agglomeration index. It is based on three factors: Population density, The population of a ‘large’ city centre and Travel time to that large city centre. The main objective in constructing this new measure is to provide a globally consistent definition of settlement concentration in order to conduct cross-country comparative and aggregated analyses. As an accessible measure of economic density, the agglomeration index lends itself to the study of concepts such as agglomeration rents in urban areas, the ‘thickness’ of a market, and the travel distance to such a market with many workers and consumers. With anticipated advances in remote sensing technology and geo-coded data analysis tools, the agglomeration index can be further refined to address some of the caveats currently associated with it.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7034bfe64e2635713783af44b6f4660d00f8052d
Citations in the corpus
- Applying the Degree of Urbanisation to the globe: A new harmonised definition reveals a different picture of global urbanisation (2020, unknown): “This is the case for the World Bank agglomeration index (Uchida and Nelson, 2009), Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMPv1) (CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), 2011) and the Making room for a planet of cities (Angel et al.”
- The spatial allocation of population: a review of large-scale gridded population data products and their fitness for use (2019, unknown): “, 2017), measurement of economic development (Nordhaus, 2006; Uchida and Nelson, 2009; Roberts et al., 2017), transportation infrastructure management and rural access (Iimi et al.”
- Subaltern Urbanisation in India (2017, unknown): “Uchida and Nelson (2010) try to measure the extent of Indian population that lives within an hour s commute of a large town.”