This paper attempts to summarize many of these empirical regularities about metropolitan development and its determinants. Although much of our knowledge about metropolitan development is still imperfect, in the past 35 years a great deal of theoretical and empirical work has been carried out on cities and metropolitan areas in both developed and developing countries with market-oriented economies. This work has produced a set of empirical findings with remarkably strong regularities across countries and cities. Moreover, many of these empirical regularities are quite consistent with urban location theory and tend to indicate the broad applicability of our basic theory to market based cities. These regularities offer insights about the development and growth pressures that exist in many cities and indicate what directions future development is likely to take. It would be tempting to argue that all of the empirical regularities discovered are consistent with theory, have normative content, or reflect underlying outcomes that are efficient. In many cases this may be true, but care must be taken in drawing such conclusions because some of these stylized facts may be based on technological or demographic factors as much as they are theory or market outcomes. This paper - a joint product of the Research Advisory Staff and Transport, Water, and Urban Development Department - was presented at a conference on transport and regulation at Harvard University in September 1997.
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