ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to identifying and integrating insights from literatures on theoretical and empirical approaches to accounting for urban productivity differentials. It considers whether a reworked microeconomic perspective is justified in order to increase one's understanding of urban productivity growth dynamics and differentials. Since productivity growth is a key to real income and competitiveness gains and is one of the important yardsticks of economic performance, the issue of metro-scale productivity differentials has been a focal point of much regional and urban economic scholarship. The literature on urban productivity has been focused on the theory of optimum city size which claims that the size of a region's population plays a dominant role in explaining metro-scale productivity differentials. Metro-scale productivity can be examined using econometric methods to study how labor or total factor productivity varies with metro size understood in a variety of ways.
