Probing the Relationship between Urban Primacy and Economic Development: A Cross-country Analysis

According to a prevalent belief since the 1960s، patterns of national spatial systems have been thought to be dynamically transmuted appropriate to the levels of national economic growth and development until a rather balanced and efficient hierarchy of city-sizes is realized. This evolutionary process can be divided into two significant phases backed by the theories of “neoclassical economic equilibrium” and “polarized development”. That is، at the initial phase of development، economic growth essentially leads to resources and population concentration in a few core cities entitled “primate cities.” After that، in the second phase of development، sufficient degree of economic expansion would lead to gradual reduction of “urban primacy” through dispersion of growth factors and population throughout the nation. In view of economic principles، the aforementioned dispersive process would inevitably come to pass as a result of emerged diseconomies arising out of excessive agglomeration، congestion، and negative externalities within the primate cities. Based on this “nonlinear (inverted U-shape) model” and the “negative unidirectional relationship” suggested by some researchers، numerous time-series and cross-country studies using various indexes have investigated the existence and behavior of the mentioned interrelation. But upshot of these researches is contradictory and inconclusive until now. We aim at elucidating and probing into this disputation. So، for controlling the distortions caused by the diversity of primacy and development indexes employed in previous studies، we use 8 primacy indexes and 3 development indexes of 67 countries in the year 2000. Our statistical tests with varied (unidirectional and nonlinear) mathematical functions reveal that، aggregately، there is not any significant “cross-country” relationship between urban primacy and economic development.