Today more than half of the 7 billion inhabitants of the planet live in urban areas, with this share expected to keep rising. Whereas in developed countries urbanisation has been a long and slow process, in developing countries this process is now characterised by a really fast pace and a high...

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy's exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries,...

Urban concentration differs across countries. One determinant of these differences is economic development, which first increases and subsequently decreases urban concentration. I condition the degree of urban concentration on the potential of countries to develop a balanced urban system. These...

We investigate how urban concentration and urbanization affect economic growth in developing countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel of 39 countries for the years 1960-1990 we discover a U-shaped relationship for urban concentration. This suggests the...

We provide new insights on the city size distribution of countries around the world. Using more than 10,000 cities delineated via geospatial data and a globally consistent city identification scheme, we investigate distributional shapes in all countries. In terms of population, we find that...

Since the pioneer work of Williamson, several authors have shown that urban concentration in a country tends to increase during the economic take-off and the industrialisation, and to decrease beyond a given per capita income of about 5000 $ (of 1985). This article provides an insight, using the...

This paper proposes a simple model of economic geography in which to derive analytical results when jointly considering two centrifugal forces —congestion costs together with the pull demand effect— within the Dixit-Stiglitz-Iceberg framework. In this vein, we develop a unified model with...

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy's exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries,...

We investigate how urban concentration and urbanization affect economic growth in developing countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel of 39 countries for the years 1960-1990 we discover a U-shaped relationship for urban concentration. This suggests the...