While population density represents an important socio-economic parameter, its role is rarely studied in the literature (contrary to natural models). This paper represents a survey of mostly author’s results on important influences of this factor. Population density plays an important role in harvesting societies, i.e. those that depend on agriculture and natural resources. With the development of industry and services and emergence of urban areas, population density becomes less economically important unless we consider aspects related to pollution. There exists a phase transition between rural and urban area makes population density less important in urban area contrary to rural. However, the economic influence of population density in harvesting societies is also not straight forward. As it was shown in [1], too high population density decreases the natural endowment per capita, but eases the development of infrastructure, leading to existence of an optimal population density for economic growth. As it is shown in [2], population density also influences an optimal country size, where the cost balance is now between border protection and communication costs. Among other issues, the paper [3] considers emergence of ethnic communities based on more cooperative behaviour in the case of low cultural and physical distances. At the same time, the paper [4] shows that higher probability of large projects (like infrastructure) leads to development of cooperative behaviour in the society. Elaboration along these lines leads to the conclusion that  population density positively correlates with individualistic (non-cooperative, non-altruistic) behaviour, through less time spent in cooperative infrastructure projects and higher frequency of meetings between individuals that with some probability lead to non-cooperative games. We have observes substantial level of cooperation in the USSR in the 20^th century, where big construction sites in low populated areas in Siberia lead to the development of cooperative behaviour. Population density also influences the demand for a monopolistic product, where too little density can lead to non-survival of a monopoly.

References:

[1] Yegorov Y. (2005) “Role of Density and Field in Spatial Economics” – In: Yee Lawrence (Ed). “Contemporary Issues in Urban and Regional Economics”. Nova Science Publishers, N.Y., p.55-78.

[2] Yegorov Y. (2005) “Dynamically Sustainable Economic Equilibria as Self-Organized Atomic Structures” – In: M.Salzano, A.Kirman, Eds., “Economics: Complex Windows”, Springer-Verlag Italia, p.187-199.

[3] Yegorov Y. (2007) “Econo-physics: A Perspective of Matching Two Sciences”, Evol. Inst. Econ. Rev., vol.4(1), p.143-170.

[4] Yegorov Y. (2000) “Evolution of Trust in Societies”, Proceedings   of the 4th Japan-Australia Joint Workshop on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems, Hayama,    Japan, October 2000, p. 185-192.

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