Openness and urban concentration in Europe, 1870-1990

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy's exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries, allowing to explore reliable historical data. The results generally confirm earlier findings of a negative relationship between openness and city size for the period from 1970 to 1990, but are much weaker for other time periods and concentration measures. Therefore, it is argued that the linkage between trade policy and urban centralization is not robust.