Does democratization lead to a more dispersed city size distribution and more spatially dispersed economic activity?
Velichkov, Kamen
2020
- This paper uses three strategies to examine the city size distribution and spatial distribution of economic activity in the former planned economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. First, an analysis of different measures of city size distributions reveals that the urban systems of most of these countries became more concentrated and unequal in ... read moreterms of HHI and Gini. Zipf coefficients decreased in absolute terms on average in the 2000s and 2010s, suggesting that the probability of observing a few large cities in the urban systems increased. Evidence of Gibrat’s Law was inconclusive. Second, using an instrumental variable approach, we find that a deterioration of one standard deviation in institutional quality leads to a 15 percent decrease in the average primacy of nightlights for the former planned economies. More democratic countries are expected to have significantly larger central cities as measured by their nightlight luminosity. Third, borders have a non-monotonic effect on urban population growth vis-à-vis distance. In addition, cities within 25 kilometers of the border in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland experienced statistically and economically significant growth for each additional year of EU membership of their closest neighboring country. Advisor: Professor Yannis M. Ioannides.read less
- ID:
- 5999nh680
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
- Usage:
- Detailed Rights
