Asian cities: spatial dynamics and driving forces

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The data contain over 1500 cities covering 43 Asian and Pacific countries/economies from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for the region as a whole as well as the five largest countries in the region. The exercise produces some novel evidence on several policy-relevant topics including urbanization status and patterns, relations between urbanization and economic growth, evolution of urban systems, primate cities, testing Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law, the drivers of city growth, and emergence of city clusters.