最新推薦城化外文文獻(xiàn)翻譯

1、文獻(xiàn)出處： Henderson V. The urba ni zati on process and econo mic growth: The so-what question J. Journal of Economic Growth, 2003, 8(1): 47-71.原文The Urba ni zati on Process and Econo mic Growth:The So-What QuestionVERNON HENDERSONThere is an exte nsive literature on the urba ni zati on process looki ng

2、at both urba ni zati on and urba n concen trati on, ask ing 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 exte nt to which the urba n popul

3、ati on of a country is concen trated 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 urba ni zati on or an optimal level of urban concentration, but no research to date has

4、 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 urba n concen trati on,

5、 in terms of maximiz ing 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 stron gly affected by urba ni zati on

6、per se. Rapid urba ni zati on has ofte n 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 urba ni zed.Keywords: growth, primacy, urba ni zati onThere is an enormous literature on the urbani

7、zation process that occurs with development (see Davis and Henderson, 2003 for a review). There are two key aspects to the process. One is urba ni zati on itself and the other is urba n concen trati on, or the degree to which urba n resources are concen trated in one or two large cities, as外文文獻(xiàn)翻譯opp

8、osed to spread over many cities. Part of the interest in the urba ni zati on process arises because urba ni zati on and growth seem so in terc onn ected. In any year, the simple correlatio n coefficie nt across coun tries betwee n the perce nt urba ni zed in a country and, say, GDP per capita (in lo

9、gs) 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 in dustrial service based economy (as well as releasing labor from agriculture, as labor-sav ing tech no logies are in troduced). That tran sfor

10、matio n in volves urba ni zati on, as firms and workers cluster in cities to take adva ntage of Marshall's (1890) localized exter nal econo mies of scale in manu facturi ng and services (He nders on, 1974; Fujita and Ogawa, 1982; Helsley and Stra nge, 1990; Dura nton and Puga, 2001).Econo mists

11、have ten ded to focus on the issue of urba n concen trati on, rather than urbanization per se. The literature that does exist on urba ni zati on exam ines rural versus urba n bias in the tran sformati on process. Governments may favor the urban-industrial sector with trade protection policies, infra

12、structure investments, or capital market subsidies or they may discrim in ate aga inst the rural sector with agricultural price controls (Renaud, 1981; O, 1993), both lead ing workers to migrate to cities. But there can be a bias towards inhibiting urbanization. For example, former planned economies

13、 tend to exhibit a rural bias, i n the sense of discourag ing rural-urba n migrati on, but not n ecessarily in dustrial developme nt (Ofer, 1977; Falle nbuchl, 1977).The more exte nsive literature on the degree of urba n concen trati on and cha nges in that degree which occurs as urba ni zati on and

14、 growth proceed has a variety of stra nds. Coun tries and intern ati onal policy officials worry about whether key cities are too big or too small (Re naud, 1981; UN, 1993; WDR, 2000) and over the years various countries such as Egypt, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and China have pursued medium size city p

15、rograms desig ned to forestall the growth of larger cities (Henderson, 1988; Ades and Glaeser, 1995). Intern ati onal age ncies presume that many of the world's mega-cities are overpopulated, at con siderable cost to those econo mies. The UN (1993) asks how bad "the n egative factors associ

16、ated with very large cities" need to get "before it is in the self interest of those in con trol to en courage developme nt of alter native cen ters." The same report war ns of "un bala need urba n hierarchies" and the crime, con gesti on and social in equality in mega-citie

17、s. The World Development Report (2000) has a chapter (7) on the grim life of people in mega-cities in develop ing coun tries. And the Econo mist in one of its special surveys has posed the questi on directly (July 29, 1995): Do the sple ndors of large cities outweigh their dark side?The Effects of U

18、rba n Concen tratio n on Growth Developme ntIn this section, I examine the effect of urban concentration on productivity growth. I start with urban concentration, or primacy, because that exam in atio n yields the key results. The exam in ati on also develops the methodology that is then applied to

19、theexam in ati on of the effect of urba ni zati on on growth. The first issue is how to measure urba n concen trati on. There are three measures that people use. First, Wheat on and Shishido (1981) and Hen ders on (1988) use the sta ndard Hirschma n-Herfi ndahlin dex ofconcen trati on which in an ur

20、ba n con text is the sum of squared shares of every city in a country in national urban population. Second, Rosen and Resnick (1981) use the Pareto parameter looking at the distributi on of city sizes with in a coun try, which measures how quickly size declines as we move from top to bottom in the size distributi on, or the overall degree of disparity in the size distributio n.In these papers, both measures were con structed for just one year for a limited sample of mostly larg