"Romes without Empires": Primate Cities, Political Competition, and Economic Growth
@inproceedings{Karayalin2005RomesWE, title={"Romes without Empires": Primate Cities, Political Competition, and Economic Growth}, author={Cem Karayalçin}, year={2005} }
Many developing economies are characterized by the dominance of a super metropolis. The coexistence of a primate city with a low level of economic development is not an accident, the former being symptomatic of the causes of the latter. Taking historical Rome as the archetype of a city that centralizes political power to extract resources from the rest of the country, we develop two models of rent-seeking and expropriation which illustrate different mechanisms that relate political competition…
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