Agglomeration and demographic change

This article investigates common consequences of demographic change and economic integration for the spatial location of economic activity. In doing so, it provides a unified framework that introduces an overlapping generation structure into a New Economic Geography model. Whether integration leads to agglomeration crucially hinges on the demographic properties of economies. While population aging strengthens concentration tendencies, population growth acts as a dispersion force. This is consistent with the stylized relationships between demography and urbanization found in the data and thus allows us to assess the possibility of agglomeration in various demographic scenarios. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.