marshall s scale economies using panel data this paper estimates plant level production functions for machinery and high tech industries that allow for scale externalities from other plants in the same industry locally and from the scale or diversity of local economic activity outside the own industry the paper finds that the count of other own industry plants representing a count of local information spillover sources has strong productivity effects in high tech but not machinery industries single plant firms both benefit more from and generate greater external benefits than corporate plants given their greater reliance on external environments on dynamic externalities high tech single plant firms benefit also from the scale of past own industry activity i find little evidence of economies from the diversity or scale of local economic activity outside the own industry

urbanization fertility and child education in sub saharan africa abstract using individual level survey data we show that the urbanization process in today s sub saharan africa is associated with the fertility transition and increased investment in child education this is consistent with the experience of the western economies during their transition from a post malthusian towards a modern growth regime the use of individual level data allows us to analyze structural rural urban differences holding constant age and regional characteristics which are potentially confounding factors in regional and country level regressions

agglomeration economies and industrial decentralization the wage productivity trade offs abstract this paper examines the industrial location trade offs between the productivity advantages of the metropolitan center and the lower land and the labor costs in outlying regions within the state of sao paulo brazil the results indicate that while plant productivity is enhanced by the considerable agglomeration economies existing within metropolitan sao paulo firms must pay for these benefits in high wages and land costs offsetting labor cost savings can be achieved by locating in outlying regions the evidence presented in this paper suggests that market forces may lead eventually to a spontaneous decentralization of industry

contingent values as implicit contracts estimating minimum legal willingness to pay for conservation of large carnivores in sweden mean willingness to pay wtp based on multiple bounded discrete choice responses from contingent valuation surveys are normally obtained using some kind of parametric estimator this paper instead exploits the possibility to interpret the response to the discrete choice question as an implicit contract between the researcher and the respondent resulting in a minimum legal wtp mlw estimator never previously used in valuation literature it is used in this paper to estimate the wtp for the preservation of large carnivores in sweden based on a large scale national survey results show that mlw estimates only were 12 19 of the comparable parametric estimates in keeping with other results in contingent valuation literature we find that the mlw estimates are positively related to the educational level income and the fraction of urban population while negatively related to age among the advantages of the mlw estimator is its transparency as well as the fact that it rests on a contractual notion of wtp

valuing option existence and bequest demands for wilderness to assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage we develop a simple model of bequest value the basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality

urban growth and productivity the case of greece the present paper reports an attempt to estimate the role of urbanisation economies in greek industry using a flexible form of production function obtained from a taylor series expansion of a polynomial it is estimated that the labour productivity of the manufacturing sector is five per cent higher with each doubling of urban population the substantial advantages to urban production seem to be at the heart of the urbanisation process that accompanied industrialisation in greece the policy implications are that decentralisation policies may be justifiable on regional equity but not on economic efficiency grounds selection and promotion of a few urban centres in each region would be a more successful regional policy

political economy of u s sugar policies this article examines political economic decision making with respect to u s sugar policies it evaluates the responsiveness of target prices and import quotas levels to changes in a the economic surpluses of market participants and b the federal budget deficit results indicate a weak linkage between sugar producer surplus and subsequent target prices levels but a strong linkage between the federal budget deficit and subsequent import quota levels the influences of sugar users corn sweetener producers and foreign countries are also examined

the comparative advantage of cities abstract what determines the distributions of skills occupations and industries across cities we develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies our model incorporates a system of cities their internal urban structures and a high dimensional theory of factor driven comparative advantage it predicts that larger cities will be skill abundant and specialize in skill intensive activities according to the monotone likelihood ratio property we test the model using data on 270 us metropolitan areas 3 to 9 educational categories 22 occupations and 19 industries the results provide support for our theory s predictions

the political economy of sugar legislation the findings of this paper are a rather straightforward account of the political economy of senatorial voting on the sugar program in the spirit of stigler and peltzman s accounts of interest group activity voting on sugar is indeed related to the concentration of economic interests in the senators states states with high concentrations of sugar growers and processing tend to vote for the program those with high concentration of users tend to vote against it the emergence of corn syrup as a sugar substitute and its subsequent interests in the program further supports this perspective these concentrated interests are associated with conditions ripe for overcoming the collective action problem and we infer use their organizations to influence senatorial behavior the political variables suggest countervailing forces which can be interpreted at least in part as further examples of organized here politically organized influences on the interests of senators thus while the model is one of opposing interests those of producers and users tend to influence different senators the major group interest trade off then is between the pull of organized interests in the constituency with that of party organization at the national or national institutional level at least for those for whom the pull is in opposite directions

the proper scope of government theory and an application to prisons when should a government provide a service in house and when should it contract out provision we develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost if contracts are incomplete the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both quality improvement and cost reduction than a government employee has however the private contractor s incentive to engage in cost reduction is typically too strong because he ignores the adverse effect on noncontractible quality the model is applied to understanding the costs and benefits of prison privatization

metropolitan evolution sectoral economic change and the city size distribution metropolitan evolution is conceptualised from a broad long term perspective that focuses on demographic and sectoral economic variables emphasis is placed on understanding these changes from a process oriented approach that considers its general relevance rather than its outcomes or microanalytic details a selective review of the literature provides a significant perspective and background on the stages model that is applied to the study of metropolitan change this is then related to the pareto city size distribution by considering the interurban population distribution coefficient and its expected performance over the various phases of metropolitan evolution a hypothetical interurban manufacturing employment distribution coefficient analogous to the pareto population coefficient is also considered and is related to the process of metropolitan and interurban sectoral economic change the relationship between metropolitan change and national urban size distribution is viewed as a significant compone

spatial evolution of the computer industry in the usa abstract this paper examines the spatial evolution of computers across 317 metro areas in the usa since the introduction of the personal computer we start by examining the relative distribution of employment across cities examining how that distribution changes in 1977 1992 and how cities move through the distribution for computers transition matrices are stationary with the industry exhibiting no tendency to settle down nor any tendency of retrenchment during periods of national high tech employment decline there is no tendency of the relative size distribution of computer employment to collapse go bimodal etc overall computers exhibit some turbulence with dramatic big winners and losers among cities as well as persistence for some cities in employment shares in attracting or repelling an industry urban heterogeneity is important large well educated cities near san jose have a much greater chance of attracting high tech employment much lower mean first passage times moving up states and less chance of losing it in assessing the determinants of persistence in local employment patterns we examine sources of productivity growth we find strong evidence of significant dynamic own industry externalities for single plant firms and little evidence of urbanization jacobs knowledge type externalities corporate plants in computers seem to be self reliant and not really influenced by externalities

urban development in the united states 1690 1990 the united states transformed itself from a rural to an urban society over the last three cen turies after a century of unremarkable growth the pace of urbanization was historically un precedented between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the twentieth century the urban population continued to increase but in a much more dispersed manner as the sub urban population increased throughout these developments cities also exhibited considerable variation in their population sizes this paper finds that the pace and pattern of u s urban development are explained by changes in regional comparative advantage and in economies in transportation and local public goods which in turn were determined by the changes in the economic structures of cities this paper also finds that cities varied considerably in size because the larger cities reduced market transaction costs associated with coordinating greater geograph ic division of labor

a note on the estimation of the demand for sugar in the usa in the presence of measurement error in the data inaccuracy in the measurement of the price data for the substitute sweeteners for sugar is a problem encountered in the estimation of the demand for sugar two diagnostics are introduced to assess the effect that this measurement error has on the estimated coefficients of the sugar demand relationship the regression coefficient bounds diagnostic is used to indicate a range in which the true price responsiveness of consumers to changes in the price of sugar substitutes lies the bias correction factor is computed to evaluate the magnitude of the overestimation of the responsiveness of the quantity of beverage sugar and non beverage sugar demanded to a change in the price of sugar

economic growth in a cross section of cities abstract we examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth between 1960 and 1990 income and population growth move together and both types of growth are 1 positively related to initial schooling 2 negatively related to initial unemployment and 3 negatively related to the initial share of employment in manufacturing racial composition and segregation are uncorrelated with urban growth across all cities but in cities with large nonwhite communities segregation is positively correlated with population growth government expenditures except for sanitation are uncorrelated with growth government debt is positively correlated with later growth

measuring the social costs of suboptimal combinations of policy instruments a general framework and an example abstract since most agricultural programs employ two or more policy instruments simultaneously it is notable that little research has attempted to find optimal instrument combinations and no research exists which evaluates the social costs unrealized benefits of combining instruments suboptimally in our paper we report a simple and feasible method to find optimal policy instrument combinations and we provide the first general formal approach to measuring the social costs of suboptimal policy instrument combinations our approach is illustrated in an analysis for five major u s crops corn feed grains wheat rice cotton the simple model we employ for the illustration suggests that except for the feed grains program the observed programs combined policy instruments quite suboptimally we conclude that agricultural economics research now can and should begin placing increased emphasis on studying optimal policy instrument combinations

modelling the non market environmental costs and benefits of biodiversity projects using contingent valuation data cv studies rarely ask willingness to accept wta questions yet there are a range of environmentalprojects where there are likely to be potential losersas well as gainers this paper presents evidence fromsix biodiversity projects that the inclusion ofcontingent compensation payments from thoserespondents who preferred the status quo cansubstantially reduce net project benefits even whenthe proportion of losers is relatively small astatistical model for estimating the mean welfaremeasure from dichotomous choice data which allows forboth positive wtp zero wtp and wta is described asmany environmental projects are likely to create bothgainers and losers we recommend that cv analysts giveserious consideration to the collection and analysisof wta data otherwise they risk generating biasedestimates of project benefits

structural transformation and the deterioration of european labor market outcomes this paper examines hours worked in continental europe and the united states from 1956 to 2003 the empirical work establishes two results first hours worked in europe decline by almost 45 percent compared to the united states over this period second this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the fact that europe develops a much smaller market service sector than the united states a simple model of time allocation is used to understand these patterns i find that relative increases in taxes and technological catch up can account for most of the differences between the european and american time allocations over this period

valuing the mortality risk of wildlife reintroduction heterogeneous risk preferences abstract this study is the first to value the mortality risk incurred from wildlife reintroduction we conducted choice experiments on wolf reintroduction in hokkaido japan in order to value the resulting mortality risk this process involves three unique factors the mortality risk is zero before the reintroduction the increment of the risk caused by the reintroduction is substantially small and the risk largely depends on citizens individual characteristics concerning reintroduction because of these factors the heterogeneity of risk preference is expected to be large in order to examine these heterogeneous risk preferences we use a random parameter logit model the estimation results confirm that considerable heterogeneous risk preferences exist finally the mean marginal willingness to pay to prevent the loss of one person per one billion people because of wolf reintroduction is several hundred yen

gains and losses of sugar program policy options high domestic sugar prices supported by u s sugar policy have induced a significant substitution of corn sweeteners for sugar recognizing the close relationship between sugar and corn sweeteners this study applies a general equilibrium approach to evaluate the distributional effects of three different policy options i e quota tariff and deficiency payment on sugar related interest groups the results show that the current quota policy intended ostensibly to protect domestic sugar producers have hurt foreign exporters it will harm domestic sugar producers if the trend continues additionally the quota program is the most expensive of the options considered

a dynamic interregional theory of migration and population growth the authors attempt to bring the theory of regional amenity value determination together with a theoretical framework on migration to form a cohesive theoretical model they build on previous efforts to do this by introducing factors such as the housing market and determination of the equilibrium level of real full income the implied geographical focus is on the united states annotation

urban wages and labor market agglomeration abstract using the 5 public use micro sample of the 1990 u s census we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry groups quantitatively the effect is large with an elasticity measured at the means of between 1 2 and 3 6 for these effects we interpret the willingness of firms to pay more for equivalent workers in dense markets as evidence of an agglomeration economy in urban labor

international outsourcing and factor prices with multistage production we develop a dual representation of the technology of international fragmentation for an industry using 2 factors in a continuum of stages we then derive a generalised factor price frontier which incorporates an endogenous adjustment of the margin of fragmentation using this frontier in a 2 2 general equilibrium model we investigate the role of outsourcing in the adjustment to a decline in the final output price of the multistage industry and the attendant factor price effects we also explore the implications of an improved technology of international fragmentation on the margin of fragmentation and on domestic factor prices

a theory of urban growth in an economy experiencing endogenous economic growth and exogenous population growth we explore two main themes how urbanization affects efficiency of the growth process and how growth affects patterns of urbanization localized information spillovers promote agglomeration and human capital accumulation fosters endogenous growth individual city sizes grow with local human capital accumulation and knowledge spillovers and city numbers generally increase which we demonstrate is consistent with empirical evidence we analyze whether local governments can successfully internalize local dynamic externalities in addition we explore how growth involves real income differences across city types and how urbanization can foster income inequality most nonagricultural production in developed countries occurs in metropolitan areas the underlying reasons why economic activity agglomerates into cities localized information and knowledge spillover also make cities the engines of economic growth in an we gratefully acknowledge support of the national science foundation grants sbr 9422440 and sbr9730142 for this research the work has benefited from conversations with harl ryder on the dynamics of the model and from comments by gilles duranton and participants in seminars at brown colorado and texas austin and a presentation at an isit seminar sponsored by the centre for economic policy research and the national bureau of economic research

applied general equilibrium welfare analysis harberger has long advocated a particular technique for measuring the sum of all effects of an intervention both in the intervened in and related markets the technique is to calculate consumer and producer surplus changes behind demand and supply curves that are explicitly general equilibrium ge that is along curves that hold constant demand and supply conditions in related markets but not prices by calculating surplus changes with respect to such curves one simulates the equilibrium price paths in other markets resulting from the intervention and captures the sum of the welfare effects several authors have elaborated on harber

acquisition versus greenfield investment the location and growth of japanese manufacturers in the united states o huallacha in b and reid n 1997 acquisition versus greenfield investment the location and growth of japanese manufacturers in the united states reg studies 31 403 416 investigating foreign direct investment by principal modes of entry helps explain the location of japanese manufacturers in the united states japanese greenfield start ups and acquired plants had distinct interregional distributions in different decades we use ordinary least squares and tobit regression analyses to account for interstate variation in the levels of japanese acquired and greenfield establishment in 1979 1989 and 1992 and their expansion in the 1970s 1980s and early 1990s the greenfield plants propelled the formation of automobile based industrial complexes in the midwest and southeast regions greenfield investors also avoided states with strong unions and over time they became unconstrained by the general distribution of american manufacturing although supplies of procurable assets consistently constrained

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

nonresponse in contingent valuation reducing uncertainty in value inference this paper focuses on problems associated with nonresponse in contingent valuation surveys the results from a telephone follow up survey show that value inference can be considerably improved by information on nonrespondents attitudes

productivity and city size a critique of the evidence a critique of two leading articles in the productivity and city size literature results in revised estimates of the productivity advantages of large cities in particular extant estimates of the elasticity of productivity with city size are revised downward by over 100 percent for the manufacturing sector and about 25 percent for the entire urban economy after revision productivity advantages of larger cities are found to be much larger for the nonmanufacturing sector than for the manufacturing sector hence revitalization policies for large cities should be focused on nonmanufacturing sectors

gatt and agriculture the role of special interest groups a the 1980s have been a decade of crisis for much of world agriculture following a period of unusual growth in world demand and trade the 1980s have witnessed a decline in exports plummeting agricultural prices widespread economic distress in farming and associated industries and rising trade tensions as nations have sought to protect their farmers institute for international economics p 1 b the playing field in world agricultural trade is uneven some countries subsidize their exports some tax imports others tax exports most nations try to help their farmers through domestic farm programs all these influences converge to distort the price signals that would otherwise govern supply and demand in a freer trade environment the resulting hodgepodge has disadvantaged many producers in the united states and other countries even though their farm products are among the least expensive to produce ballenger dunmore and lederer p 1 c the problems of agriculture have engaged the attention of world leaders and have become a major issue in the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations under the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt a number of fora including the gatt ministerial meeting at punta del este in september 1986 that launched the uruguay round the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd ministerial meeting in may 1987 and the venice summit of industrial country leaders in june 1987 have issued declarations which support liberalization of agricultural trade and reform of domestic farm policies trade ministers of the gatt countries will also meet in december 1988 in

agglomeration economies as manifested in technical efficiency at the firm level abstract this paper makes an attempt to assess the significance of agglomeration economies in the case of two indian industries electrical machinery and cotton and cotton textiles using firm level data an efficiency index based on a statistical stochastic frontier model is generated to examine its relationship with external scale variable s a positive association between technical efficiency and city size is evident although after a certain threshold level city size works more as diseconomies than economies of scale undue emphasis on industrial dispersal may therefore lead to suboptimal utilisation of resources

information technology consultancy firms economies of agglomeration from a wide area perspective agglomeration economies remains a powerful concept in spatial analysis however in order to keep its full relevance for contemporary urban and regional systems it must be completed in two ways

why not hang them all the virtues of inefficient punishment replacing a criminal punishment with another that both is more severe and has a lower ratio of punishment cost to amount of punishment while reducing the probability of conviction to maintain the same level of deterrence lowers both punishment cost and enforcement cost hence imprisonment is always dominated by execution and both are dominated by fines and other alternatives moden legal systems do not fit that pattern one possible explanation is that the ability enforces to profit by convictions and produce costly rent seeking examples include product liability litigation civil forfeiture and fraudulent prosecution motivated by rewards in eighteenth0 century england the problem was avoided by the use of infficient punishments in the legal system of saga period iceland and the private norms of shasta county california execution while not directly profitable for enforcers facilitates rent seeking through threats leading to out of court settlements

a world of cities the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries historically urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire but there has been an explosion of poor mega cities over the last 30 years a simple urban model illustrates that in closed economies agricultural prosperity leads to more urbanization but that in an open economy urbanization increases with agricultural desperation the challenge of developing world mega cities is that poverty and weak governance reduce the ability to address the negative externalities that come with density this paper models the connection between urban size and institutional failure and shows that urban anonymity causes institutions to break down for large cities with weak governments draconian policies may be the only way to curb negative externalities suggesting a painful trade off between dictatorship and disorder a simple model suggests that private provision of infrastructure to reduce negative externalities is less costly when city populations are low or institutions are strong but that public provision can cost less in bigger cities

the world distribution of income falling poverty and convergence period we estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts gdp per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion poverty rates and head counts are reported for four specific poverty lines rates in 2000 were between one third and one half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines there were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970 we estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income all of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s

industrial bases and city sizes away from heavy manufacturing and bluecollar occupations and towards professional activities communications finance insurance real estate and high tech activities should we expect these gains and losses to be spread across cities or are certain cities likely to be gainers and others losers in terms of population are losers likely to experience permanent declines in population or for some will their losses level off or will they rebound if the growth industries of an economy operate best in larger cities while declining industries tend to reside in smaller cities this implies national population will shift from smaller cities to locating in larger cities this increase in urban concentration means there will be changes in other patterns of resource usage efficient levels of per capita resources devoted to urban infrastructure roads sewers parks etc tend to rise with city size and it is a common perception that the magnitudes of certain consumer externalities congestion air and water pollution crime etc rise with city size this has implications for public policies governing the allocation of public investment and governing the regulation of externalities moreover the changes in population allocation between larger and smaller cities itself involves to some extend a painful process of population upheavals and there may be public policies which can alleviate the costs of the adjustment process in this paper i outline a conceptual framework and empirical methodologies from which some of these issues can be examined

structural change in a multisector model of growth we study a multi sector model of growth with differences in tfp growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change characterized by sectoral labour reallocation and constant aggregate growth path the conditions are weak restrictions on the utility and production functions commonly applied by macroeconomists we present evidence from us two digit industries that is consistent with our predictions about structural change and successfully calibrate the historical shift from agriculture to manufacturing and services we show quantitatively that reasonable deviations from our conditions do not have a big impact on the properties of the model

assessing the impact of the sugar programme on the us economy abstract this study examines the effect of the sugar tariff rate import quota program on the united states economy based on a computable general equilibrium model the analysis suggests that a complete elimination of the sugar program would reduce output for all producing sectors by about 2 85 billion for producing sectors besides the agriculture programme crops crude oil and petroleum refining sectors output would increase by about 2 98 billion additionally there would be an increase of about 197 million and 121 million in the consumption of goods and services and in welfare respectively the government sector would realize a reduction in revenue of about 15 million

voluntary export restraints as protection policy the u s beef case there are several well known implications of international trade theory which are relevant to our study with a tariff an importing country s welfare can improve only if the excess supply curve is upward sloping under the large country assumption bhagwati has shown that a quota used by an importer can be equivalent to a tariff and mintz has contrasted features of tariffs quotas and vers empirical work has focused largely on the effects of tariffs and equivalent quotas generally exporting countries lose from such trade barriers in contrast we find that exporting countries gain and importing countries lose with a ver we also contrast the gains and losses of vers in the case of frozen boneless beef to an optimal tariff and optimal export tax the theoretical implications of vers for beef exporters were first recognized by freebairn and gruen

urban agglomeration capital augmenting technology and labor market equilibrium abstract the objective of this paper is to measure urban productivity using japanese city based cross sectional data of 1980 the results of a labor demand ols regression analysis suggest two kinds of possible model specifications capital augmenting and demand supply equilibrium each model type is considered and the average effect of population density on labor productivity is shown to be 4 3 in the capital augmenting model and 8 0 in the equilibrium model

productivity growth in british manufacturing spatial variation in the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure this paper investigates the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure in creating spatial variation in manufacturing labour and total factor tfp productivity in britain separate estimates of a translog specification are presented for british manufacturing firms located in defined areas of the country over the period 1994 1998 the results show that tfp change due to scale economies and technological growth has been of much less important in influencing the output growth of manufacturing firms than input growth or industrial structure regarding the components of tfp technological growth has been the dominant force at play the analysis of average labour productivity identifies shifts to other factors of production and industrial structure as being the main determinants of change scale economies appear to have had a marginal role the results identify spatial patterns indicating that more favourable locational effects arise for firms in areas adjacent to large urban centre

urbanisation and regional productivity in korean manufacturing as the first study for korea we estimate the effects of urbanisation and localisation economies on the productivity of 19 korean manufacturing industries in 1983 1988 and 1993 based on the observation that material inputs contributed about 60 per cent of productivity growth in korea we consider gross output productivity which is an innovation that distinguishes our study from previous ones we find that localisation economies have been dominant features of korean manufacturing industries whereas korean manufacturing industries did not benefit much from locating in large cities more interestingly there are some indications of quadratic relations between city size and urbanisation economies

judging agricultural policies a survey this survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural policy challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical framework it is shown how the literature has gone from examining a very small discrete set of simple policies to a much broader often continuous set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously the importance of the pareto criterion used to explore the limits of how government can affect welfare is revealed moreover given the importance of the objective of income redistribution in agricultural policy agricultural economists have often departed from the purely efficiency oriented tradition in economics it is shown that they have tried to incorporate equity considerations by either adding these criteria as constraints to the social welfare function or directly incorporating these criteria in the functional form of the social welfare function

openness country size and government abstract this paper shows that smaller countries have a larger share of public consumption in gdp and are also more open to trade these empirical observations are consistent with recent theoretical models explaining country formation and break up and may account for the observed positive empirical relationship between trade openness and government size

cities skills and regional change glaeser e l ponzetto g a m and tobio k cities skills and regional change regional studies one approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships such as zipf s or gibrat s law an alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies this paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the united states and finds that few if any growth relationships remain constant including gibrat s law education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades but it does not seem to predict county growth a century ago after reviewing this evidence a simple model of regional change is presented and estimated where education increases the level of entrepreneurship human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labour demand it is found that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship not

economies of density and productivity in service industries an analysis of personal service industries based on establishment level data abstract this study aims to empirically investigate the determinants of service industry productivity such as economies of scale and economies of density by using establishment level data related to personal service industries in japan the study estimates the production functions for both value added and physical output measures in almost all the service industries examined significant economies of scale and economies of density are observed wherein productivity increases by 7 to 15 when the municipality population density doubles these findings are confirmed by an estimation in which the measures of physical output are considered instead of value added

trade in goods and trade in tasks an integrating framework abstract we introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise we use this framework to provide versions of the gains from trade and the famous four ho theorems heckscher ohlin factor price equalisation stolper samuelson and rybczynski that apply to this environment we extend our framework to accommodate monopolistic competition and two way offshoring and to integrate theoretical results of the early offshoring literature

globalization and the skilled city abstract the location of economic activity both across and within countries has undergone dramatic shifts over the last five decades three key trends stand out first cross country inequality has declined as many developing countries have grown rapidly second economic geography within countries has instead grown more unequal in both the developed and the developing world third within country spatial disparities have grown mainly because of the disproportionate success of skilled cities in this paper i develop a model that jointly explains these patterns as a consequence of deepening international economic integration my model explains the faster population and output growth of skilled cities as well as their tendency to increase their initial skill advantage consistent with the evidence my theory predicts a non monotonic path of urban growth in developed countries the model predicts a future shift in worldwide urban hierarchies as some developing world cities overtake unskilled cities in industrialized countries along global supply chains

effect of sugar price policy on u s imports of processed sugar containing foods abstract the relationship between u s and world sugar prices and u s import demand for four categories of sugar containing products is examined results from econometric estimation indicate that u s intervention in the sugar market has helped to increase u s imports of some sugar containing products but that increased disposable income has played a more important role although some developing countries have benefitted from u s sugar policy by increasing their exports of sugar containing products to the united states u s sugar policy has helped imports from developed countries proportionately more than those from developing countries as a whole

career incentives of city leaders and urban spatial expansion in china this paper develops a theoretical framework to study the critical role that politics play in shaping the spatial dimension of china s urbanization and the related welfare implications utilizing a

export sophistication and economic growth evidence from china we consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance by appealing to regional variation within one single country china over the 1997 2009 period we find evidence in support of hausmann hwang and rodrik 2007 in that regions specializing in more sophisticated goods subsequently grow faster we find substantial variation in export sophistication at the province and prefecture level controlling for the level of development and that this sophistication in turn drives growth our results suggest that these gains are limited to the ordinary export activities undertaken by domestic firms no direct gains result from either processing trade activities or foreign firms even though these are the main contributors to the global upgrading of china s exports as such the extent of assembly trade and foreign entities should be distinguished in order to measure the true movement in a country s technology and the contribution of exports to economic growth

agglomeration economies in urban manufacturing industries a case of japanese cities abstract the effects of urban agglomeration economies on productivities in two digit manufacturing industries is estimated using the cross section data of japanese cities in 1979 urbanization and localization economies which are major forms of urban agglomeration economies are explicitly separated the estimates of these economies vary considerably among industries light industries receive more productive advantages from urbanization economies than from localization economies but heavy industries experience these economies more from localization economies than from urbanization economies

population growth and local public finance in japanese cities the determinants of japanese city population growth for the period 2000 to 2005 are empirically examined with particular attention to local public finance the selection of one fiscal indicator fi from four alternatives ordinary balance ratio obr ratio of outstanding borrowing rob to the ordinary account debt service payment ratio dspr and financial power index fpi and the consideration of spatial auto correlation provide 12 regression models in each regression six additional explanatory variables are considered with reference to earlier empirical studies empirical results suggest that 1 three fis excluding dspr are significant and 2 the number of local government officers and the ratio of graduates of not less than junior college are highly significant in all specifications

processing industry capacity and the welfare effects of sugar policies normally analysis of policies affecting commodities such as sugar employs long run comparative statics under certainty and ignores processing industries like cane sugar refining under the implicit assumption that the capital is malleable in both the short and long run we present a dynamic model calibrated to world sugar and solved with numerical dynamic programming that includes the specific capital of the refining industry when compared to an otherwise identical static model the dynamic model suggests that some 20 of welfare losses may be misattributed to cane sugar producers instead of refiners in contrast the difference between certainty and uncertainty proves to be unimportant

agglomeration economies localization or urbanization i estimate localization and urbanization economies with a methodology and data different from those of henderson and nakamura after demonstrating the problems associated with using a single agglomeration variable i present my estimates as nakamura found for japanese cities i find evidence of both localization economies and urbanization economies but i also find evidence of urbanization diseconomies in some industries as did henderson my evidence for localization and urbanization economies in american cities is stronger than henderson s evidence finally i show that the pattern of agglomeration economies by industry is consistent with observed patterns of industrial location

outsourcing in a global economy we study the determinants of the location of subcontracted activity in a general equilibrium model of outsourcing and trade we model outsourcing as an activity that requires search for a partner and relationship specific investments that are governed by incomplete contracts the extent of international outsourcing depends inter alia on the thickness of the domestic and foreign market for input suppliers the relative cost of searching in each market the relative cost of customizing inputs and the nature of the contracting environment in each country

land pressures the evolution of farming systems and development strategies in africa a synthesis abstract evidence assembled in this special issue of food policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on african development issues this study synthesizes how people markets and governments are responding to rising land pressures in africa drawing on key findings from the various contributions in this special issue the papers herein revisit the issue of boserupian agricultural intensification as an important response to land constraints but they also go further than boserup and her followers to explore broader responses to land constraints including non farm diversification migration and reduced fertility rates agricultural and rural development strategies in the region will need to more fully anticipate the implications of africa s rapidly changing land and demographic situation and the immense challenges that mounting land pressures pose in the context of current evidence of unsustainable agricultural intensification a rapidly rising labor force associated with the region s current demographic conditions and limited nonfarm job creation these challenges are manageable but will require explicit policy actions to address the unique development challenges in densely populated rural areas

agglomeration economies and productivity in indian industry abstract the primary objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which agglomeration economies contribute to economic productivity we distinguish three sources of agglomeration economies 1 at the firm level from improved access to market centers 2 at the industry level from intra industry localization economies and 3 at the regional level from inter industry urbanization economies there is considerable variation in the sources and magnitudes of agglomeration economies between industrial sectors in particular our results indicate that access to markets through improvements in inter regional infrastructure is an important determinant of firm level productivity whereas benefits of locating in dense urban areas do not appear to offset associated costs

using satellite imagery to create tax maps and enhance local revenue collection although taxes on land and property have many desirable attributes the challenge of ensuring completeness of tax rolls and currency of valuations preclude their effective use to support urbanizati