Determinants of Population Growth of the Cities of Iran: A Spatial Econometrics Approach

Problems of Urbanization expansion and unbalanced growth of cities have attracted the great attention of city planners and decision makers. This paper determines the effective factors on the growth of cities and investigates the role of poverty in the process of urbanization. In this regards, we consider four groups of factors that include economic factors, social and cultural factors, geographical factors and infrastructural factors. In this study, we use data from 336 cities for the period of 2007-2016. The population growth model is estimated with spatial error model. Because of the heteroscedasticity in our spatial model, we have used Kelejian-Pruch (2010) estimator.The results show that there are spatial effects in the model for population growth in the cities of Iran. Poverty, unemployment rate, and specialization index from economic factors and fertility rate, average age and the level of the education from social and cultural variable factors are among the most important factors affecting the population growth of the cities.