Demography, urbanization and development: Rural push, urban pull and … urban push?

Abstract

Developing countries have urbanized rapidly since 1950. To explain urbanization, standard models emphasize rural-urban migration, focusing on rural push factors (agricultural modernization and rural poverty) and urban pull factors (industrialization and urban-biased policies). Using new historical data on urban birth and death rates for 7 countries from Industrial Europe (1800-1910) and 35 developing countries (1960-2010), we argue that a non-negligible part of developing countries' rapid urban growth and urbanization may also be linked to demographic factors, i.e. rapid internal urban population growth, or an urban push. High urban natural increase in today's developing countries follows from lower urban mortality, relative to Industrial Europe, where higher urban deaths offset urban births. This compounds the * We would like to thank the editor Vernon Henderson, two anonymous referees,

Secondary Towns and Poverty Reduction: Refocusing the Urbanization Agenda

“…If anything, the correlation may be negative. Faster urban growth, partly due to faster innate urban population growth (Jedwab, Christiaensen and Gindelsky, 2015), at lower income levels and lower institutional capacity makes it much harder to keep up the public capital stock needed to capture the agglomeration economies. With a greater share of workers and growth generated in non-traded services, as opposed to manufacturing, following the spending of resource rents in cities, many cities in developing countries may also not stand to benefit to the same degree of the economies of agglomeration than those in developed countries (Gollin, Jedwab, and Vollrath, 2016).…”

Fertility Decline in Urban and Rural Areas of Developing Countries

“…; Jedwab et al. ; Jiang and O'Neill ). The rate of this endogenous population increase depends on the pace of the urban fertility decline.…”

Urbanisation, local food crop production and tourism output of Pakistan

“…There are numerous studies conducted on urbanisation (Jedwab et al . ), agriculture (Malik and Ali ), energy consumption (Amin and Rahman ; Shahbaz et al . ), environmental degradation (Azam and Khan ; Faridi et al .…”

“…There are numerous studies conducted on urbanisation (Jedwab et al 2015), agriculture (Malik and Ali 2015), energy consumption (Amin and Rahman 2019;Shahbaz et al 2017), environmental degradation (Azam and Khan 2016;Faridi et al 2018), and poverty (Baqir 2018;Khan et al 2016). A close review of existing literature shows that there are hardly any studies conducted on urbanisation, local crop production and tourism output.…”