Determinants of City Growth in Brazil
49 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2005 Last revised: 27 Feb 2022
There are 2 versions of this paper
Determinants of City Growth in Brazil
Date Written: August 2005
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the determinants of Brazilian city growth between 1970 and 2000. We consider a model of a city, which combines aspects of standard urban economics and the new economic geography literatures. For the empirical analysis, we constructed a dataset of 123 Brazilian agglomerations, and estimate aspects of the demand and supply side as well as a reduced form specification that describes city sizes and their growth. Our main findings are that increases in rural population supply, improvements in inter-regional transport connectivity and education attainment of the labor force have strong impacts on city growth. We also find that local crime and violence, measured by homicide rates impinge on growth. In contrast, a higher share of private sector industrial capital in the local economy stimulates growth. Using the residuals from the growth estimation, we also find that cities who better administer local land use and zoning laws have higher growth. Finally, our policy simulations show that diverting transport investments from large cities towards secondary cities do not provide significant gains in terms of national urban performance.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
By J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, ...
-
Determinants of City Growth in Brazil
By Daniel Da Mata, Uwe Deichmann, ...
-
Examining the Growth Patterns of Brazilian Cities
By Daniel Da Mata, Uwe Deichmann, ...
-
Regional Subsidies and Industrial Prospects of Lagging Regions
By Alexandre Carvalho, Somik V. Lall, ...
-
Regional Subsidies and Industrial Prospects of Lagging Regions
By Somik V. Lall and Christopher Timmins
-
By Leo Feler and J. Vernon Henderson
-
Economic Integration in the Lower Congo Region: Opening the Kinshasa-Brazzaville Bottleneck
By Marius Brülhart and Mombert Hoppe