Rural and Urban Population Changes and the Stages of Economic Development: A Unified Approach

Abstract

A model is presented which can yield a dynamic path of economic development from very early stages through more advanced stages in an attempt to shed light on what Alonso called the “five bell-shapes” within a unified framework. The model is able to explain not only the occurrence of a downturn in the rural population after the initial phase of population growth both in rural and urban areas, but also the delayed occurrence of such a downturn in many present-day developing countries. The author then focuses the later stages of economic development and explains two alternative courses of urbanization, namely, the reversal process and the continual-growth process, as special cases of the general model; which of the courses occurs depends on the value of the elasticity of urban agglomeration-economies.