Locational fundamentals, trade, and the changing urban landscape of Mexico

Abstract

Where do cities emerge and evolve? We examine persistence and change in the distribution of Mexico's urban population from the colonial era to the present, with emphasis on the country's 20th-century transformation. We demonstrate that while early trade patterns and historical persistence were instrumental in sowing the seeds of Mexico's contemporary city system, both technological change and policy significantly altered the trajectory of urbanization. The relative importance of locational fundamentals decreases over time, while the influence of international trade access increases, highlighting that political and economic decision-making shape the importance of geography for development. The findings suggest that although geographic advantage plays an important role in initial city emergence, geography is not destiny in urbanization.

Tourism and Economic Development: Evidence from Mexico’s Coastline

“…Mexican workers choose in which region to live within Mexico. Given the properties of the Fréchet distribution and the workers' utility maximization problem in (2), the share of workers who choose to live in region n ∈  can be expressed as…”

“…At the same time, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the economic consequences of the development of the services sector in developing countries, and whether the reallocation of factors of production into services can give rise to adverse long-term effects both locally and in the aggregate. 2 This paper sets out to study the economic consequences of tourism, a fast-growing services sector in developing countries. Tourism involves the export of otherwise non-traded local services by temporarily moving consumers across space, rather than 1 This view is in the tradition of Baumol (1967).…”

“…This view is in the tradition ofBaumol (1967). SeeHerrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi (2014) for a review of the recent literature, andMcMillan and Rodrik (2011) for an analysis in the context of developing countries 2. See, for example,Copeland (1991) for an early theoretical discussion of tourism as a potential "Dutch disease.…”

Spatial–temporal evolution of the allometric growth between economic scale and carbon emissions in China’s cities and its driving mechanism

“…According to the relevant theories of regional economics and urban geography and combined with the existing research on allometric growth and urbanization levels (Moussiopoulos et al, 2010 ; Lang et al, 2019 ; Alix-Garcia & Sellars, 2020 ), this article selects 12 indicators, i.e., the economic development level, industrial development level, fiscal investment level, city investment intensity, social consumption level, technological development level, urban development level, land use level, transportation development level, opening up level, urban greening level and energy utilization efficiency, to construct the driving factor system for the allometric growth coefficient of the economic scale and carbon emissions of China’s cities (see Table 1 ).…”