“The Economics of Urbanization” is the title of a course that I plan to teach at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, starting next week. I am looking forward to being at the ISB for the next five weeks.
The course is an exploration of the idea (related to the theme on cities and urbanization explored on this blog) that economic growth and urbanization are bidirectionally linked. I hope to argue the case for urbanization of India based on simple economics.
Some apparently simple ideas have profound implications. One such is the idea of economies. It comes in various flavors: scale, scope, agglomeration, internal, external, and so on. These are tied to other concepts. Scale economies arise from the presence of fixed costs. Which brings us to the varieties of costs — fixed, variable, marginal, sunk, etc.
Like most foundational courses, it will be a vocabulary course. Vocabulary is important because without it, reasoning about a topic would be too tedious if not impossible. A course on the economics of urbanization is, aside from anything else, a course on economics. My job will be to build the vocabulary so that one can competently reason about the matter of urbanization and with some luck, reach some tentative position on why it matters, and the policy implications that flow from that position.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 
Hi Atanu
I am very glad to know you’ll be teaching this as an academic course.
Will you be sharing this course content online?
Arvind
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Hi Atanu:
This is good.
It will be good if your lectures can be on video and then put online.
It will be a good start to the kind of education/IT stuff you are talking about.
Suhit
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