Urban primacy, external costs, and quality of life

Abstract

George Tolley’s work on urbanization examined the costs and benefits of increases in city sizes. In this paper, I try to distinguish empirically the internal costs of increases in city sizes, from the external costs imposed on cities of having excessive urban primacy in a country. Primate cities tend to draw high levels of public investments and other resources from their countries, as national governments try to prop up the deteriorating quality of life in primate cities as their sizes increase. The result is significant deterioration in the quality of life of non-primate cities.