SummaryWe explore the effects of the growing urbanization of rural areas in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico and investigate whether the presence of small- and medium-sized cities within rural–urban territories enhances economic growth and reduces poverty and income inequality compared to deep-rural and metropolitan territories. For Chile and Colombia, our results suggest that these urban centers can make a greater contribution to the rate of economic growth and poverty reduction in rural–urban territories compared to deep-rural ones, but in some cases with a rise in income inequality. The mechanisms through which urban centers affect the dynamics of territorial development are country-specific

SummaryThis paper summarizes a study of changes in per-capita income, monetary poverty, and income distribution in 9,045 subnational administrative units of nine Latin American countries between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. The results largely support spatial convergence of mean household incomes, although the estimates indicate it has been slow. Territorial inequality is found to be persistent and reduces the pro-poor effect of local income growth. Although national-context specific, the estimates also indicate that territorial development dynamics are influenced by the structural features of the territories. In view of the evidence, territorial development policies in Latin America seem well warranted

The results of the elections have increasingly brought to the forefront the long‐standing issue of lagging regions – also labelled as “places that don’t matter” – since they had a great influence on the electoral outcomes. In this paper, we focus on the municipal results of the Italian senate elections, held in March 2018. Italy is a peculiar country where two non‐traditional parties, namely “Lega” and “Movimento 5 Stelle” (M5S), ended up forming the government coalition running until August 2019 and competing for different shades of populism. Our aim is to investigate the regional characteristics which underlie the local preferences for the two non‐mainstream parties. Firstly, we find that the spatial distribution of their votes is associated with territorial socio‐economic and institutional differences, and hence that Lega and M5S are characterized by a different electoral base (e.g. Lega capitalized its traditional support in the North, while M5S won especially in the South). Secondly, beyond these expected regional patterns, our evidence also highlights a sharp rural‐urban contrast.

This paper investigates the relationship between market potential and the spatial variation in the number and the average size of firms. We adapt the canonical model of the New Economic Geography to demonstrate this relationship and to derive an empirical specification suitable for estimation through dynamic panel techniques. The model is tested against municipal data on the number of firms per adult in Chilean comunas for 2005–2010. Our results confirm that market potential along with place-specific fixed costs play an important role in determining the spatial variation in the number of firms per capita.