Urbanization and Development : Is Latin America and the Caribbean Different from the Rest of the World?

Roberts, Mark ; Blankespoor, Brian ; Deuskar, Chandan ; Stewart, Benjamin

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: URBANIZATION;    STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION;    AGGLOMERATION INDEX;    ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY;    POPULATION CLUSTERS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8019
RP-ID  :  WPS8019

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Two long-established stylized facts inthe urban and development economics literatures are that:(a) a country's level of economic development isstrongly positively correlated with its level ofurbanization; and (b) a country's level of urbanizationis strongly negatively correlated with the size of itsagricultural sector. However, countries in the Latin Americaand Caribbean region appear to depart significantly from therest of the world in these two basic relationships. AlthoughLatin American countries appear to be significantly moreurbanized than predicted based on these globalrelationships, Caribbean countries appear significantly lessurbanized. However, analyses involving cross-countrycomparisons of urbanization levels are undermined bysystematic measurement errors arising from differences inhow countries define their urban areas. This paperreexamines whether Latin America and Caribbean countriesdiffer from the rest of the world in the basic stylizedfacts of urbanization, development, and structuraltransformation. The analysis makes use of two alternativemethodologies for the consistent definition of urban areasacross countries: the Agglomeration Index methodology and amethodology based on the identification of dense spatiallycontiguous clusters of population. Both methodologies relyon globally gridded population data sets as input. Thereexist several such data sets, and so the paper also assessesthe robustness of the findings to the choice of inputpopulation layer.