The Economics of Isolation and Distance

This paper explores the economic implications of isolation and remoteness. Evidence on the impact of distance on trade costs and trade flows is reviewed, and the effects of remoteness on real incomes are investigated. Empirical work confirms the predictions of theory, that distance from markets and sources of supply can have a significant negative impact on per capita income. The possible implications of new technologies for these spatial inequalities are discussed.Economic isolation, market access, trade costs.

Yawning gaps.

Why has globalisation brought such large increases in exports to some countries and not to others? Stephen Redding and Anthony Venables look at the way internal geography and domestic institutions seem to be a large part of the answer.

Economic Geography and International Inequality

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita income can be explained by the geography of access to markets and to sources of supply of intermediate inputs. These results are robust to the inclusion of other geographical, social, and institutional characteristics. The estimated coefficients are consistent with plausible values for the structural parameters of the model. We find quantitatively important effects of distance, access to the coast, and openness on levels of per capita income.Economic Development Economic Geography International Trade

Explaining Cross-Country Export Performance: International Linkages and Internal Geography

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries' exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from improved internal supply-side conditions. Building on the results of this decomposition, we move on to an econometric analysis of the determinants of export performance. Results include the finding that poor external geography, poor internal geography, and poor institutional quality contribute in approximately equal measure to explaining Sub-Saharan Africa's poor export performance.Economic Development, Economic Geography, International Trade

Geography and Export Performance: External Market Access and Internal Supply Capacity

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries' exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from improved internal supply-side conditions. Building on the results of this decomposition we move on to an econometric analysis of the determinants of export performance. Results include the finding that poor external geography, poor internal geography, and poor institutional quality contribute in approximately equal measure to explaining Sub-Saharan Africa's poor export performance.

The economics of cities: from theory to data

Economic activity is highly unevenly distributed within cities, as reflected in the concentration of economic functions in specific locations, such as finance in the Square Mile in London. The extent to which this concentration reflects natural advantages versus agglomeration forces is central to a range of public policy issues, including the impact of local taxation and transport infrastructure improvements. This paper reviews recent quantitative urban models, which incorporate both differences in natural advantages and agglomeration forces and can be taken directly to observed data on cities. We show that these models can be used to estimate the strength of agglomeration forces and evaluate the impact of transportation infrastructure improvements on welfare and the spatial distribution of economic activity

The Economic Geography of Trade, Production, and Income: A Survey of Empirics

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the economic geography of trade flows, factor prices, and the location of production. The discussion is structured around the empirical predictions of a canonical theoretical model. We review empirical evidence on the determinants of trade costs and the effects of these costs on trade flows. Geography is a major determinant of factor prices, and access to foreign markets alone is shown to explain some 35% of the cross-country variation in per capita income. The paper documents empirical findings of home market (or magnification) effects, suggesting that imperfectly competitive industries are drawn more than proportionately to locations with good market access. Sub-national evidence establishes the presence of industrial clustering, and we examine the roles played by product market linkages to customer and supplier firms, knowledge spillovers, and labour market externalities.

Multi-Product Firms and Product Switching

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching among U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that two-thirds of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that one-third of the increase in real U.S. manufacturing shipments between 1972 and 1997 is due to the net adding and dropping of products by survivors, and that firms are more likely to drop products which are younger and have smaller production volumes relative to other firms producing the same product. The product-switching behavior we observe is consistent with an extended model of industry dynamics emphasizing firm heterogeneity and self-selection into individual product markets. Our findings suggest that product switching contributes towards a reallocation of economic activity within firms towards more productive uses.

Products and Productivity

Firms' decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard measures of firm productivity. We develop a theoretical model of heterogeneous firms endogenously self-selecting into heterogeneous products. We characterize the bias introduced by unobserved variation in product mix across firms, and the implications of this bias for identifying firm and industry responses to exogenous policy shocks such as deregulation. More generally, we demonstrate that product switching gives rise to a richer set of industry-level dynamics than models where firm product mix remains fixed.

Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firm-product-level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm's payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm's productivity across all products, which induces a positive correlation between a firm's intensive (output per product) and extensive (number of products) margins. Trade liberalization fosters productivity growth within and across firms and in aggregate by inducing firms to shed marginally productive products and forcing the lowest-productivity firms to exit. Though exporters produce a smaller range of products after liberalization, they increase the share of products sold abroad as well as exports per product. All of these adjustments are shown to be relatively more pronounced in countries' comparative advantage industries.