How Should We Measure City Size? Theory and Evidence Within and Across Rich and Poor Countries

By Remi Jedwab, Prakash Loungani, Anthony Yezer

September 20, 2019

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Remi Jedwab, Prakash Loungani, and Anthony Yezer. How Should We Measure City Size? Theory and Evidence Within and Across Rich and Poor Countries, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2019) accessed December 26, 2024

Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.

Summary

It is obvious that holding city population constant, differences in cities across the world are enormous. Urban giants in poor countries are not large using measures such as land area, interior space or value of output. These differences are easily reconciled mathematically as population is the product of land area, structure space per unit land (i.e., heights), and population per unit interior space (i.e., crowding). The first two are far larger in the cities of developed countries while the latter is larger for the cities of developing countries. In order to study sources of diversity among cities with similar population, we construct a version of the standard urban model (SUM) that yields the prediction that the elasticity of city size with respect to income could be similar within both developing countries and developed countries. However, differences in income and urban technology can explain the physical differences between the cities of developed countries and developing countries. Second, using a variety of newly merged data sets, the predictions of the SUM for similarities and differences of cities in developed and developing countries are tested. The findings suggest that population is a sufficient statistic to characterize city differences among cities within the same country, not across countries.

Subject: Housing, Housing prices, Income, Labor, National accounts, Population and demographics, Prices, Wages

Keywords: Building height, Building Heights, Cities, Density function, Economic development, Global, Housing, Housing prices, Income, Income elasticity, Low income, Measurement, Per capita income, Population, Sprawl, Standard Urban Model, Transportation, Urban Giants, Urban Technology, Urbanization, Wages, WP

Publication Details

Pages:

55
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Working Paper No. 2019/203
Stock No:

WPIEA2019203
ISBN:

9781513513782
ISSN:

1018-5941

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