Publication: World Development Report 2009: A Practical Economic Geography
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Date
2010
ISSN
00130095
Published
2010
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The World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography (WDR 2009) was written to inform policy debates about urbanization, lagging areas, and globalization. During almost two years of consultations and dissemination, the report met with broad acceptance among government officials, development professionals, and researchers. Policymakers grappling with difficult spatial development issues have found the report's analytical framework compelling and its policy guidance useful. An exception to this generally favorable reception has been the reaction from a number of economic geographers. In this article, we respond to criticisms about the report's scope, guiding framework, and policy implications that are emphasized in the accompanying articles in this issue of Economic Geography. In conclusion, we agree with economic geographers such as Rodriguez-Pose who call for critical engagement with the report and with the more detailed follow-up studies that use the WDR 2009's framework. This would both improve the quality of spatial policy advice and increase the visibility of economic geographers in international development debates.
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Publication Texture and Tractability: The Framework for Spatial Policy Analysis in the World Development Report 2009(2011)Development is accompanied by significant spatial transformations--changes in the distribution of people and economic activities. The World Development Report 2009 Reshaping Economic Geography draws lessons from history and academic research to develop a concise framework for understanding these dynamics. This framework makes rigorous spatial policy analysis tractable. But it has been criticize--mostly by geographer--for ignoring the "importance of place." This paper explains why it is necessary to draw out common patterns in the development experience of different countries even if this requires generalization and simplification. Recent applications at the urban, national, and regional level demonstrate how the framework accommodates contextual and place specific information to ensure the relevance of applied policy analysis.Publication Reshaping Economic Geography : Implications for New EU Member States(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)The ongoing crisis should spur deeper European integration, rather than a return to the nationalism of the past. The World Development Report 2009, reshaping economic geography, spotlights several issues for new European Union (EU) member states. From 1950 to 1990, Eastern Europe was impermeable to the flow of goods, services and ideas from the West, and grew slowly. During the same period, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in fourteen Western European economies grew at three times the pace of Eastern Europe. The drivers of West European growth were market economies, regional cooperation, and global economic integration. The European Economic Community, started by six Western European nations in 1957, continued to increase its membership with the ultimate aim of full economic and monetary integration. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, the EU10 countries, along with Malta and Cyprus, joined the expanded European Union, an economic zone based on the principles of democracy, markets and the free mobility of goods, capital and labor. The 27country European Union has a combined population of almost 500 million people and accounts for over 30 percent of the world's GDP. But the legacy of division has meant that the EU10 countries lag considerably behind most of the other member states. While the EU10 have brought 123 million people into the European Union, they have reduced its average level of GDP per capita by an estimated 15.6 percent.Publication Uganda - Promoting Inclusive Growth : Transforming Farms, Human Capital, and Economic Geography, Synthesis Report(Washington, DC, 2012-02)At an average above 6.0 percent per year over the past two decades, Uganda' s growth rate was impressive by all standards. In parallel, poverty declined significantly, not only in urban areas, but also to some extent within the rural areas. This combination was possible because the key drivers of growth were labor-intensive services sectors, some of which are agriculture based. In fact, Uganda's growth process has reduced overall poverty faster than what has been observed in many other developing countries. This report addresses the issue from a double perspective: sectoral and geographical. From a sectoral perspective, it concludes that the agricultural sector needs transformation because it remains the primary employer; it is the country's main comparative advantage and bedrock for industrialization. More broadly, identifying sectors with potential will be important for employment opportunities, which in turn will be largely dependent on productivity levels and thus on the level of education and skills of the labor force. From a geographical perspective, transformation generally yields a concentration of economic activities that leaves some locations lagging in prosperity. This unbalanced growth needs to be supported with appropriate economic integration policies that have been analyzed in the report.Publication On the Road to Prosperity? The Economic Geography of China’s National Expressway Network(2010-11-01)Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones. This paper evaluates the aggregate and spatial economic impacts of China's newly constructed National Expressway Network, focussing, in particular, on its short-run impacts. To achieve this aim, the authors adopt a counterfactual approach based on the estimation and simulation of a structural "new economic geography" model. Overall, they find that aggregate Chinese real income was approximately 6 percent higher than it would have been in 2007 had the expressway network not been built. Although there is considerable heterogeneity in the results, the authors do not find evidence of a significant reduction in disparities across prefectural level regions or of a reduction in urban-rural disparities. If anything, the expressway network appears to have reinforced existing patterns of spatial inequality, although, over time, these will likely be reduced by enhanced migration.Publication Scale Economies and Cities(World Bank, 2010-08-02)This paper summarizes the policy-relevant insights of a generation of research on scale economies. Scale economies in production are of three types: internal economies associated with large plants, localization economies that come from sharing of inputs and infrastructure and from greater competition among firms, and urbanization economies that are generated through diversity and knowledge spillovers. The benefits (and costs) of localization and urbanization are together called “external (dis) economies” because they arise due to factors outside any single household, farm or firm. The empirical literature yields some stylized facts. Internal scale economies are low in light industries and high in heavy industries. External scale economies are amplified by economic density and dissipate with distance from places where economic activity is concentrated. Scale economies are most visibly manifest in towns and cities. To simplify somewhat, towns allow firms and farms to exploit internal scale economies, medium-sized cities help firms in an industry exploit localization economies, and large cities and metropolises provide urbanization economies to those who locate within or nearby. Scale economies have implications for policy makers. The first is that because urban settlements rise and thrive because market agents demand their services, they should be seen as creatures of the market, not creations of the state. The second is that because settlements of different sizes provide differing services, towns, cities, and metropolises are more often complements for one another, not substitutes. Third, as a corollary, policymakers should aim to improve the functioning of urban settlements, and not become preoccupied with their size.
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