Gonzague Vannoorenberghe
(IRES/LIDAM)
Globalization and the urban-rural divide in France
Abstract: The growing economic divide between globalized urban centers and left-behind rural places is a powerful narrative in many countries. This paper uses rich administrative micro data to quantify whether urban-rural economic linkages have decreased in France over the period 1995-2015. In a set of reduced form exercises, we first show that employment growth in urban areas outperformed the rest of the country, especially in the second half of the period. This happens at the same time as a reduction in positive spillovers of urban growth to neighboring rural areas. We then build and calibrate a spatial general equilibrium model of trade and migration featuring a variety of linkages. We find little evidence of disappearing links between urban and rural territories, and no role for globalization on economic linkages between urban and rural areas.
Joint with F. Mayneris and D. Verdini