Analysis of impact of population relocation on city commerce: Micro-level estimation with agent-based model

Abstract

Relocation policy has been developed by governments to resolve various problems caused by over-population. The government of Korea implemented a relocation policy that moves government branches to newly developed city to reduce overpopulation and its accompanying problems around the capital area. However, negative impacts from the relocation policy are also suggested, such as depression of local commerce in the originally hosted city. On the government side, it is essential to consider such negative effects in developing relocation policies. Therefore, this paper estimates the impact on the city commerce by a reloca-tion policy using an agent-based model in a micro level. The agent-based model consists of various types of agents and traffic environments in the interested area, and regenerates the commercial activities in there. Calibrating parameters of the agent-based model using the real data, I performed virtual experiments and evalu-ated changes of the local commerce by observing the individual activities. Moreover, the simulation results are validated with rent rates from the real world, which shows the value correlation as 48.3% and the rank correlation as 85.45%.