Essays on economic geography: service location, urban concentration and economic growth
- Autores: Domingo Pérez Ximénez de Embún
- Directores de la Tesis: Fernando Sanz Gracia (dir. tes.), Marcos Sanso Frago (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de Zaragoza ( España ) en 2011
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Elisabet Viladecans Marsal (presid.), Rosa Aisa Rived (secret.), Fernando Rubiera Morollón (voc.), Luisito Bertinelli (voc.), Klaus Desmet (voc.)
- Materias:
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Resumen
This PhD Thesis consists of four original papers whose common thread is the economic geography. These papers are organized in two parts of two chapters each one. First part studies the concentration phenomena of services. Second part builds a theoretical model linking urban concentration and economic growth.
The first chapter analyzes concentration in the service sector, focusing on the principal characteristics of the concentration process in forty 2-digit SIC service subsectors in U.S. states in the period 1969-2000. A similar analysis is performed for five service subsectors in U.S. counties. The results show that concentration clearly occurs in certain service subsectors, in some cases more intensively than in manufactures, that the level of sectoral disaggregation is important, and that concentration patterns are maintained over time without major changes.
The second chapter studies the factors that determine the location and concentration of service activities across space. For that purpose we use data from U.S. counties for a period between 1970 and 2000, considering 5 different service subsectors. We estimate panel data models. The main results are the following. We find evidence that factors such as per capita income, human capital endowment and urbanization have a positive and significant effect on service concentration. Wages show a negative effect for all sector, except transport and public utilities, explained by the possible dual effect associated to this variable. Population density does not seem to work as a clear determinant of service concentration, except for retail trade. We also test the effects of some geographical variables on service location. We additionally carry out an equivalent analysis at the state level, for which we have information for 40 service subsectors. Similar results are obtained although with some particularities.
The third chapter presents a theoretical approach to solve the main problems faced to explain the relationship between aggregate economic growth and the urban structure of an economy. The most significant conclusion reached is the existence of a theoretical relationship between aggregate economic growth and urban concentration with an inverted-U shape. This result had been previously found in an empirical context, but not as outcome of a theoretical model. An overlapping generations model with four different types of goods and two cities where their production could be located provides the dynamics of the movements of labor and goods across cities. The resulting system of two cities, with different patterns of specialization, urban concentration and economic growth rates, makes clear how to set out the comparison of aggregate growth rates: only the aggregate growth rate between two steady states, one without migration but with trade specialization and the other after migration and specialization, makes sense.
The fourth chapter is devoted to economic policy issues linked to the previous chapter. Local knowledge (or technological) spillovers generate market failures and their corresponding distortions in the allocation of resources, both static and dynamic. These distortions have their consequences on urban agglomeration and its relation to aggregate economic growth. Then the possibility of altering the allocation of resources in order to improve the relationship between urban agglomeration and economic growth by means of economic policy measures is open. This possibility of reaching clear improvements in the outcome of the model used in the previous chapter is explored as second best allocations. In spite of the difficulty of the task, previous results pointing to the convenience of adopting measures favoring decentralization are confirmed in that, in general, a correction in the relative yield of the inputs in one of the goods with knowledge externality leads in many cases to a lower primacy rate and a higher aggregate growth rate.
