City size, urban functions and growth. Some empirical evidence for Italy 2001-2011

Small and medium-sized cities host a large share of the Italian population and jobs and represent the engines of economic growth in meny regions. The study explores the economic dynamic experienced by small and medium-sized urban systems in the decade 2001-2011, investigating whether the presence of highly specialised functions may have acted as substitutes for metropolitan scale. To this end, the Italian Functional Urban Areas (FUA) are first classified according to a synthetic urban rank index and then used in a regression analysis carried out to identify the drivers of urban growth.

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