  We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more
than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear
scaling of gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major
cities have urban agglomerations and urban areas defined by the Netherlands
Central Bureau of Statistics. For these major cities we investigated the
superlinear scaling for three separate modalities: the cities defined as
municipalities, their urban agglomerations and their urban areas. We find
superlinearity with power-law exponents of around 1.15. But remarkably, both
types of agglomerations underperform if we compare for the same size of
population an agglomeration with a city as a municipality. In other words, an
urban system as one formal municipality performs better as compared to an urban
agglomeration with the same population size. This effect is larger for the
second type of agglomerations, the urban areas. We think this finding has
important implications for urban policy, in particular municipal
reorganizations. A residual analysis suggests that cities with a municipal
reorganization recently and in the past decades have a higher probability to
perform better than cities without municipal restructuring.
