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文献出处：Henderson V. The urbanization process and economic growth:
The so-what question [J]. Journal of Economic Growth, 2003, 8(1):
47-71.
原文
The Urbanization Process and Economic Growth:
The So-What Question
VERNON HENDERSON
There is an extensive literature on the urbanization process looking at
both urbanization and urban concentration, asking whether and when
there is under or over-urbanization or under or over urban concentration.
Writers argue that national government policies and non-democratic
institutions promote excessive concentration-the extent to which the
urban population of a country is concentrated in one or two major
metropolitan areas-except in former planned economies where migration
restrictions are enforced. These literatures assume that there is an optimal
level of urbanization or an optimal level of urban concentration, but no
research to date has quantitatively examined the assumption and asked
the basic "so-what" question-how great are the economic losses from
significant deviations from any optimal degrees of urban concentration or
rates of urbanization? This paper shows that (1) there is a best degree of
urban concentration, in terms of maximizing productivity growth (2) that
best degree varies with the level of development and country size, and (3)
over or under-concentration can be very costly in terms of productivity
growth. The paper shows also that productivity growth is not strongly
affected by urbanization per se. Rapid urbanization has often occurred in
the face of low or negative economic growth over some decades.
Moreover, urbanization is a transitory phenomenon where many countries
are now fully urbanized.
Keywords: growth, primacy, urbanization
There is an enormous literature on the urbanization process that
occurs with development (see Davis and Henderson, 2003 for a review).
There are two key aspects to the process. One is urbanization itself and
the other is urban concentration, or the degree to which urban resources
are concentrated in one or two large cities, as opposed to spread over
many cities. Part of the interest in the urbanization process arises because
urbanization and growth seem so interconnected. In any year, the simple
correlation coefficient across countries between the percent urbanized in a
country and, say, GDP per capita (in logs) is about 0.85. The reason is
clear. Usually economic development involves the transformation of a
country from a rural agricultural based economy to an industrial service
based economy (as well as releasing labor from agriculture, as
labor-saving technologies are introduced). That transformation involves
urbanization, as firms and workers cluster in cities to take advantage of
Marshall's (1890) localized external economies of scale in manufacturing
and services (Henderson, 1974; Fujita and Ogawa, 1982; Helsley and
Strange, 1990; Duranton and Puga, 2001).
Economists have tended to focus on the issue of urban concentration,
rather than urbanization per se. The literature that does exist on
urbanization examines rural versus urban bias in the transformation
process. Governments may favor the urban-industrial sector with trade
protection policies, infrastructure investments, or capital market subsidies
or they may discriminate against the rural sector with agricultural price
controls (Renaud, 1981; O, 1993), both leading workers to migrate to
cities. But there can be a bias towards inhibiting urbanization. For
example, former planned economies tend to exhibit a rural bias, in the
sense of discouraging rural-urban migration, but not necessarily industrial
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