Complexity Digest 2012.01 - 08
2012/01/06
Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer
The Economic Productivity of Urban Areas: Disentangling General Scale Effects from Local Exceptionality, SFI Working Papers
Excerpt: The factors that explain differences in the economic productivity of urban areas have remained difficult to measure and identify unambiguously. Here we show that a synthesis of the classical representation of economic activity in a city in terms of a production function, together with a scaling perspective that accounts for the systematic effects of population size, leads to a new expression for the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of urban areas. We empirically demonstrate that there is a systematic dependence of urban productivity on population size, resulting from the mismatch between the size dependence of wages and labor, so productivity increases by about 11% with each doubling in population.
- Source: The Economic Productivity of Urban Areas: Disentangling General Scale Effects from Local Exceptionality
[ http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/16e1a5bfbe810310216d94d95986dc9a/ ], José Lobo, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Deborah Strumsky, Geoffrey B. West, DOI: SFI-WP 11-09-046, SFI Working Papers