英文标题：
《Cities in a world of diminishing transport costs》
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作者：
Tomoya Mori, Minoru Osawa
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最新提交年份：
2021
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英文摘要：
Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may be declining. To provide insights into the long-run evolution of cities, we analyzed Japan\'s census data over the 1970--2015 period. We found that fewer and larger cities thrived at the national scale, suggesting an eventual mono-centric economy with a single megacity; simultaneously, each larger city flattened out at the local scale, suggesting an eventual extinction of cities. We interpret this multi-scale phenomenon as an instance of pattern formation by self-organization, which is widely studied in mathematics and biology. However, cities\' dynamics are distinct from mathematical or biological mechanisms because they are governed by economic interactions mediated by transport costs between locations. Our results call for the synthesis of knowledge in mathematics, biology, and economics to open the door for a general pattern formation theory that is applicable to socioeconomic phenomena.
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中文摘要：
经济活动有利于地理上的相互接近，并在空间上集中形成城市。然而，在运输成本不断下降的世界里，地理位置接近的优势正在减弱，城市在经济中的作用可能正在下降。为了深入了解城市的长期演变，我们分析了日本1970年至2015年期间的人口普查数据。我们发现，在全国范围内，越来越少的大城市蓬勃发展，这意味着最终形成了一个单一中心经济，只有一个特大城市；同时，每一座更大的城市都在局部范围内逐渐变平，这意味着城市最终会灭绝。我们将这种多尺度现象解释为自组织模式形成的一个实例，这在数学和生物学中得到了广泛的研究。然而，城市的动态不同于数学或生物机制，因为它们受由地点之间的运输成本介导的经济互动的控制。我们的研究结果要求综合数学、生物学和经济学方面的知识，为适用于社会经济现象的一般模式形成理论打开大门。
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分类信息：

一级分类：Economics 经济学
二级分类：General Economics 一般经济学
分类描述：General methodological, applied, and empirical contributions to economics.
对经济学的一般方法、应用和经验贡献。
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一级分类：Physics 物理学
二级分类：Pattern Formation and Solitons 图形形成与孤子
分类描述：Pattern formation, coherent structures, solitons
图案形成，相干结构，孤子
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一级分类：Quantitative Finance 数量金融学
二级分类：Economics 经济学
分类描述：q-fin.EC is an alias for econ.GN. Economics, including micro and macro economics, international economics, theory of the firm, labor economics, and other economic topics outside finance
q-fin.ec是econ.gn的别名。经济学，包括微观和宏观经济学、国际经济学、企业理论、劳动经济学和其他金融以外的经济专题
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