The Source of Metropolitan Growth: The Role of Commuting

Abstract

Over the past few years, a large number of studies have focused on whether population or employment is critical to the source of metropolitan growth. However, only few attempts have so far been made to additionally consider the suburbanization stage and pattern of commuting, which may both enable us to explore this "chicken-egg" issue a little further. The purpose of this paper is to compare dwelling-based (housing) with job-based (job) employment to evaluate the net commuting. The Taipei metropolitan area, for example, now lies at the initial suburbanization stage with only population decentralization and massive in-commuting to the central city. The estimation results based on a co-integration system reveal that the central-city employment can be regarded as an engine of this metropolitan economy. Besides, we also find that dwelling-based employment distorts the causality between population and employment, especially from the variance-decomposition accounts. Therefore, the importance of commuting to investigating the evolution of metropolitan economy should not be overlooked.

The dilemma of “Twin Cities”: is the suburban dependence hypothesis applicable?

“…To identify this influence, we collect monthly employment data for Taipei City and its suburb from the Manpower Survey Monthly Statistics compiled by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics during the period 1997-2008 for a total of 140 months. It should be noted that employment data based on the job-based measure can fully display the true conditions in the labor market (Chiang, 2012). Finally, data related to population are obtained from the Monthly Bulletin of Interior Statistics compiled by the Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior.…”

Reasoning the Causality of City Sprawl, Traffic Congestion, and Green Land Disappearance in Taiwan Using the CLD Model

“…Additionally, in response to the demands of residents living in high-density areas, and needed transportation infrastructure for economic growth, city governments choose short-term policies like developing rural areas and non-classified areas, which are generally called “Green Land” in this study. These policies satisfy the demand of city development by easing restrictions on rural and non-classified lands, which immediately offering large areas for roads, public facilities, and living space [ 9 , 18 ]. Accordingly, 78.33 km 2 of non-classified and rural areas have been identified as the city’s planning area.…”

“…Learning from the economic growth of American cities, many people believe that the main task of land use management by city governments is to divide the city in rarely used green land into areas with great economic benefits for industry, commerce, public transportation, residences, leisure, and public services. This provides a satisfying, sufficient, and safe environment for people [ 18 , 20 , 21 ]. However, the greatest benefit is improving the city economy.…”

“…Compared to rural areas, cities typically have economic advantage and often attract people from rural areas [ 18 ]. This is reflected by the ratio of the population living in Taiwan’s cities increased by 80% in 2013 ( Table 1 ) [ 1 , 17 ].…”

“…On the basis of these cause-and-effect relations within key variables for city traffic congestion, when the volume of developed land was insufficient for development of the road areas and other land uses, city governments continually develop green land into developed land to satisfy the increased demand for road areas and other land uses in cities [ 15 , 16 , 18 , 20 , 23 ]. These causalities treat city development and traffic congestion with the context of economic growth have dominated for many decades, often resulting city sprawl in Taiwan [ 18 ].…”