Economic geography and international inequality

Abstract

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.

Mind the Remoteness!: Income disparities across Japanese Prefectures

“…To calculate the distance 4 The results are not distorted by this adaptation. Works carried out at international level using both the theory-based measure and the alternative Harris (1954) market access formulation reach very similar results (see Redding and Venables, 2004). For other studies dealing with regional analysis that have used measures of market access similar to ours see Niebuhr (2004) and Hanson (2005).…”

Relaxing Hukou: Increased labor mobility and China’s economic geography

“…We exclude this term from (5), effectively assuming that μ = 0 (see also Hering and Poncet, 2010). As shown and emphasized by Redding and Venables, 2004), including both supplier and market access in the wage equation leads to multi-collinearity problems.…”

“…The first, introduced by Redding and Venables (2004), is to use the information contained in bilateral trade data to construct a theory-based measure of each region's market access. Subsequently this constructed measure of market access is included in the estimation of the wage equation.…”

On the road to prosperity? the economic geography of China's national expressway network

“…4 The theoretical relationship between wages and "market access" -the so-called NEG wage equation -lies at the core of our analysis. This builds on the now well-established literature which estimates the wage equation (see, inter alia, Hanson, 1997Hanson, , 2005Redding and Venables, 2004;Brakman et al, 2006;Fingleton, 2005aFingleton, , 2006Fingleton, , 2008Fischer and Fingleton, 4 It may also be argued that, from a spatial perspective, the short-run impacts are the more interesting. In the long-run, it is obvious that labor mobility will help to erode any short-run changes in regional and/or urban-rural disparities induced by a change in transport costs.…”