Growing through Cities in Developing Countries

By Gilles Duranton. 2014

205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the effects of urbanization on development and growth. It begins with a labor market perspective and emphasizes the importance of agglomeration economies, both static and dynamic. It then argues that more productive jobs in cities do not exist in a void and underscores the importance of job and firm dynamics. In turn, these dynamics are shaped by the broader characteristics of urban systems. A number of conclusions are drawn. First, agglomeration effects are quantitatively important and pervasive. Second, the productive advantage of large cities is constantly eroded and must be sustained by new job creation and innovation. Third, this process of creative destruction in cities, which is fundamental for aggregate growth, is determined in part by the characteristics of urban systems and broader institutional features. The paper highlights important differences between developing countries and more advanced economies. A major challenge for developing countries is to reinforce the role of their urban systems as drivers of economic growth.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c19d3fd73c593de929fce984b949d25d589ff9f

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Urbanization with and without industrialization (2015, background): “B Dietrich Vollrath devollrath@uh.edu Douglas Gollin Douglas.Gollin@qeh.ox.ac.uk Remi Jedwab jedwab@gwu.edu 1 Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, United Kingdom 2 Department of Economics, George Washington University”
Big or Small Cities? On city size and economic growth (2017, unknown): “role of urbanization and cities for economic efficiency and growth (Duranton 2015; Glaeser et al. 1992; World Bank 2009).”
The Rapid Urban Growth Triad: A New Conceptual Framework for Examining the Urban Transition in Developing Countries (2017, background): “Economic explanations of urban growth tend to favour rural to urban migration as the main driver underpinning the urbanization process [11,12], whereas demographic explanations are interested in urban growth as a product of natural population increase [13–15]; and, unfortunately, due to unclear defi”