In a large cross-country sample of manufacturing establishments drawn from 188 cities, average exports per establishment are smaller for African firms than for businesses in other regions. The authors show that this is mainly because, on average, African firms face more adverse economic...

How does economic geography influence industrial production and thereby affect industrial location decisions and the spatial distribution of development? For manufacturing industry, what are the externalities that matter, and to what extent? Are these externalities spatially localized? The...

This paper develops a computable spatial equilibrium model of Central Asia and uses it to analyze the possible effects of the Belt Road Initiative on the economy of the region. The model captures international and subnational economic units and their connectivity to each other and the rest of...

This paper uses the gravity model to analyze whether the varying export performance of Croatian counties can be explained by their proximity to border gates, ports, and other county-specific characteristics. The analysis finds that longer distances to border gates increase trade frictions...

This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment and specialization in Mexico for 1986-2014, through changes in access to domestic markets and travel costs to ports and the U.S. border. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in...

The geometry of the line and the circle has been used in economics for a long time to understand location choice and political positioning in democratic polity. This paper draws on some elementary ideas from geometry and game theory to extend some of the analysis to beyond lines and circles, to...

This paper investigates how internal migration is affected by Brazil?s increased integration into the world economy. It analyzes the impact of regional differences in access to foreign demand on sector-specific bilateral migration rates between the Brazilian states for the years 1995 to 2003....

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is...

This paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also...

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....