How Rent and Urban Verticalization Can Reduce Employment

Abstract

The literature on economic development in Latin America pays very little attention to urban space and rent. Urban geographers often focus on general questions of urbanism and the spatial distribution of economic activities within and across cities — and pay less attention to whether the structure of cities produces overall economic growth per se. This paper argues that development economists and urban geographers have more to say to each other than might be otherwise supposed — and that the exact form of urbanization has non-trivial effects on poverty in the Third World that have been missed.