Daniele Verdini

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Globalization and the Urban-Rural Divide in France

Abstract:
Does globalization exacerbate the economic divide between urban and rural areas? Using establishment-level data for France over the period 1995-2015, we construct the domestic firms’ linkage structures across French Employment Zones (EZ). For any EZ pair, we define a linkage as the presence of at least one establishment in both EZs that belong to the same firm or group. We complement this measure of connectedness between EZs with a proxy for domestic trade and a measure of industrial dissimilarity. Along with information about the domestic firms' linkages, we exploit municipality-level information to construct an index of urbanization degree and customs data to define various measures of exposure to globalization. We document that i) over the sample period, employment in large urban areas grows, on average, faster than in rural/medium urban EZs; ii) rural/medium urban areas’ employment growth is positively associated with the presence of firms’ linkages to large, fast-growing urban areas; eventually, but only preliminary, iii) exposure to globalization reduces the number of firms' linkages between EZs.