Publication: Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country
Date
2019-09
ISSN
Published
2019-09
Author(s)
Abstract
A variety of approaches to delineate
metropolitan areas have been developed. Systematic
comparisons of these approaches in terms of the urban
landscape that they generate are however few. Our paper aims
to fill this gap. We focus on Indonesia and make use of the
availability of data on commuting flows, remotely-sensed
nighttime lights, and spatially fine-grained population, to
construct metropolitan areas using the different approaches
that have been developed in the literature. We find that the
maps and characteristics of Indonesia’s urban landscape vary
substantially depending on the approach used. Moreover,
combining information on the metro areas generated by the
different approaches with detailed micro-data from
Indonesia’s national labor force survey, we show that the
estimated size of the agglomeration wage premium depends
nontrivially on the approach used to define metropolitan areas.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Bosker, Maarten; Park, Jane; Roberts, Mark. 2019. Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country. Background Paper for Time to ACT;. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32457 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”