On December 16th a workshop on “Urban development, agglomeration and economic growth” was held at the Bank of Italy. The workshop hinged upon the first wave of papers of the Bank of Italy's research project on "Urban development, agglomeration and economic growth".
The workshop mainly focused on preliminary evidence on the role of cities as catalyzers of economic growth, providing three main contributions. First a taxonomy of Italian municipalities into urban area and non urban ones was provided, based on the density of population (in the same spirit of the OECD classification of the Urban Audit). Second, the primacy of urban areas in terms of growth of population, employment, income, and value added was documented. Third, in a preliminary attempt to correlate growth performance to structural characteristics, a description of the structural features of Italian urban areas was provided, in terms of size, human capital endowment, real estate prices, access to credit and sector composition -in particular with regard to the location of knowledge intensive (business) services. A special focus was given to the determinants of heterogeneity of real estate prices within cities.
The research project will be finalized by Spring 2017 and intermediate results on the mechanisms of urban agglomeration and the link to economic growth will be presented in an intermediate workshop by the end of 2016. The conference program is available here.
