What happened to urbanization in the globalization era? An empirical examination for poor emerging countries

Abstract

This paper empirically examines the effects of international trade and different aspects of globalization on urbanization measures in a sample of 79 low- and lower-middle-income countries from 1970 to 2012. We use system generalized method of moments panel data estimations, and control for both internal and external economic and social factors. We perform robustness checks on the benchmark results, and find that the trade openness is positively related with population residing in the largest city. We also observe a positive relationship between globalization and the urban population in the largest city in general, and the effects are statistically significant for the economic and political aspects of globalization in particular.