Agglomeration, Regional Growth, and Economic Development

In the summer of 2007, the United Nations Population Fund released a report forecasting greatly increased levels of urbanization during the next two decades, especially in the developing world (United Nations 2007a). The report declared that for the first time in recorded history, more than half the world’s population resided in urban – not rural – areas. At roughly the same time, another agency of the United Nations (UN-Habitat) issued a report highlighting the slums and deplorable living conditions in cities in developing countries and estimating that at the end of 2007 there were more than a billion slum dwellers, largely in developing countries (United Nations 2007b). This latter report argued that in many cases the economic circumstances of urban migrants are worse than those of rural peasants. Four years earlier, it had been reported, also by the UN (United Nations 2003), that surveys of member governments eliciting their attitudes towards urbanization found that the “vast majority” of these governments would wish to shift populations back to rural areas and stem the tide of urbanization that has been experienced around the world.