The paper is devoted to problems of ensuring balanced and sustainable development of a very specific and important metropolitan region of the Russian Federation - the region of St Petersburg and surrounding it Leningrad Oblast. St.Petersburg (City) and Leningrad Oblast (Region) are both...

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural–urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural–urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

Zipf's law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination...

It has long been known that the city-size distributions are fat tailed, drawing the interest of urban economists. In contrast, not much is known about the distribution of GDP at city level (henceforth referred to as gross metropolitan product, GMP). We build a model of the spatial economy that...

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...

Second nature geography variables are very relevant in the explanation of income disparities across regions within countries and across countries. This paper uses the framework of the New Economic Geography to derive the structural equation which relates nominal wages with a distance weighted...

In this paper we analyze the role played by Market access to explain income disparities among Japanese Prefectures for different periods of time. The results of the estimations suggest that 1) Market access plays an important role in the explanation of income disparities in Japan, 2) the effect...

In this paper, we derive and estimate a New Economic Geography model for the Colombian departments.2 We first derive an econometric specification relating wages to a distance weighted sum of the volumes of economic activities of the surrounding locations. Them, we test our econometric...