population base. Cities are big enough to offer a wide variety of products, which is what appeals to many shoppers.

These factors are not exactly economies of scale in the narrow sense of the production function of a single firm, but

they are related to growth in the overall size of population and market in an area. Cities are sometimes called

“agglomeration economies.”

These agglomeration factors help to explain why every economy, as it develops, has an increasing proportion of its

population living in urban areas. In the United States, about 80% of the population now lives in metropolitan areas

(which include the suburbs around cities), compared to just 40% in 1900. However, in poorer nations of the world,

including much of Africa, the proportion of the population in urban areas is only about 30%. One of the great

challenges for these countries as their economies grow will be to manage the growth of the great cities that will

arise.
{"file_type": ".pdf", "total_pages": 597, "creationdate": "2022-12-07T14:15:44-06:00", "source": "downloads\\business\\economics\\Microeconomics3e.pdf", "uploaded_via": "batch_uploader", "producer": "Prince 14.2 (www.princexml.com)", "upload_timestamp": "2026-02-07T15:37:44.339247", "creator": "PDFMiner", "file_hash": "830b81f41611ac67a490444dbb5d6aed292224606965b06965b914443c93331a", "file_size_mb": 26.99, "moddate": "2022-12-07T14:23:05-06:00", "title": "Principles of Microeconomics 3e", "file_name": "Microeconomics3e.pdf", "source_file": "downloads\\business\\economics\\Microeconomics3e.pdf", "batch_upload": true}