Örjan Sjoberg's research while affiliated with Stockholm School of Economics and other places

Extending previous work on urbanisation under central planning, this paper sets out from the economics of shortage to develop a model of urban growth in socialist societies. Implying a focus on the effects of investments on employment and hence urban growth, this model also takes the propensity of producers to hoard labour into account. Such behaviour, it is argued, generates continued employment expansions over and above that created by the original decision to invest. Furthermore, and unlike earlier work in this tradition, an attempt is made to account for regionally differentiated outcomes within individual economies. To this end, the notion of priority is introduced. The resulting model-delineating archetypal 'landscapes of priority'—not only captures the typical sequence of urbanisation experienced by many, if not most, of the former socialist states of Europe and Asia, but also indicates from where the economies in transition from central planning have to proceed.

The study of urbanisation under central planning, while rich in empirical documentation, still lacks a theory that can take recent advances in our understanding of the socialist (or formerly socialist) societies into account. However, one of a host of new developments in urbanisation studies, the model devised by Tolley, holds great promises in store to inform our endeavours to appreciate the circumstances under which the rural-to-urban drift might take place in a variety of settings. This prompts an effort to evaluate the model's potential contribution towards an improved comprehension of urbanisation in socialist polities. Although previous studies indicate that Tolley's model would seem to fit developments in China and that of other Soviet-type economies in a rather congenial manner, it is here suggested that it is not fully appropriate. As the original model is premised upon carefully specified causal links which are not present under central planning, the conclusions drawn from an apparent congruence of patterns derived from nationally aggregated statistics are spurious at best. Therefore, it is argued, while useful in other contexts Tolley's model sheds little light on urbanisation under central planning. More generally, scholars taking an interest in comparative urbanisation would benefit from studying the processes which mold the patterns in individual cases rather than merely comparing the patterns as such.