ANALYZING THIRD-WORLD URBANIZATION - A MODEL WITH EMPIRICAL-EVIDENCE

Economic development in the Third World is being accompanied by explosive urban growth. United Nations data show that while annual urban growth rates in developed countries ranged between 1.5% and 2.4% from 1950 to 1990, Third World cities grew at rates between 3.9% and 4.7% over this period. This growth has more than doubled the urban share of the Third World population, which rose from approximately 17% in 1950 to a projected 36% in 1990 and created very large cities. The UN data show that while developed countries claimed 11 of the world's 15 largest cities in 1950, the top 15 will include only three developed country cities by the year 2000. The purpose of the present article is to propose and test an elementary model of Third World urbanization. The theoretical framework imbeds the urban economist's monocentric-city model in an economy experiencing rural-urban migration. In the empirical work, the comparative-static predictions are tested by regressing various urbanization measures on the rural-urban income ratio and the other ratios for a small cross-section sample of Third World countries. -from Author