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This paper estimates the welfare gains from upgrading several major regional corridors in West Africa. It uses a quantitative economic geography framework with trade within and across countries and mobility of people within countries to assess the economic impacts of the reduction in trade costs from road and border infrastructure investments. The findings show that the upgrade of Dakar-Lagos regional road corridor brings sizable economic benefits relative to investment costs, with a benefit-cost ratio estimated around 3. The economic benefits of road corridor upgrades are doubled and more widely spread when combined with measures to reduce current massive border delays. The benefits are negligible for Nigeria, but large for small fragile states (Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone). The gains are highest for corridors connecting large economies, and smaller and more fragile countries gain proportionally more from accessing larger markets. Finally, regional investments, including border time reduction policies, will reduce spatial inequality in the whole region but might increase inequality in some countries.

Economic Geography --- International Economics and Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Regional Corridor --- Roads and Highways --- Spatial General Equilibrium --- Trade and Regional Integration --- Trade Facilitation --- Transport --- Transport and Trade Logistics --- Transport Infrastructure

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Access to infrastructure support economic development through both capital accumulation and structural transformation. This paper investigates the links between investments in electricity, Internet, and road infrastructure, in isolation and bundled, and economic development in the Horn of Africa, a region that includes countries with different levels of infrastructure and economic development. Using data on the expansion of the road, electricity, and Internet networks, it provides reduced-form estimates of the impacts of infrastructure investments on the sectoral composition of employment. It uses a spatial general equilibrium model, based on Moneke (2020), to quantify the impacts of future transport investments and trade facilitation measures on economic development in the Horn of Africa countries.

Infrastructure --- Infrastructure Economics --- Infrastructure Economics and Finance --- Transport

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This paper examines how cities and regions within countries are likely to adjust to trade openness and improved connectivity driven by large transport investments from China's Belt and Road Initiative. The paper presents a quantitative economic geography model alongside spatially detailed information on the location of people, economic activity, and transport costs to international gateways in Central Asia to identify which places are likely to gain and which places are likely to lose. The findings are that urban hubs near border crossings will disproportionately gain while farther out regions with little comparative advantage will be relative losers. Complementary investments in domestic transport networks and trade facilitation are complementary policies and can help in spatially spreading the benefits. However, barriers to domestic labor mobility exacerbate spatial inequalities whilst dampening overall welfare.

Connectivity --- Geospatial Economics --- International Economics and Trade --- Labor Mobility --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Territorial Development --- Trade Liberalization --- Transport --- Transport Corridors --- Urban Hubs

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Based on their objective economic situation and comparing with their peers, individuals form perceptions of their economic position in a society. Data from the three waves of the Life in Transition surveys of European countries show that these perceptions systematically deviate from the rankings obtained using consumption levels. People position themselves in the middle ranks in larger numbers than those who are in the middle ranks according to their consumption levels. Correspondingly, many people who objectively are classified in the top, richest, or bottom, poorest, ranks subjectively feel that they are in the middle class. This puzzling "bunching in the middle" is the focus of this paper. Explanations are tested and discarded that consider subjective perceptions as misperceptions or the result of other mistakes due to data limitations (such as tail bias). The paper concludes that rather than reflecting a subjective assessment of the distribution of welfare, subjective rankings reveal subjective economic well-being. The paper show that monetary consumption is a strong predictor of subjective economic well-being, but that the latter is influenced by many other factors, including economic security, proxied by employment status or other measures of human capital, such as health and education. These findings have policy relevance, since redistribution measures aiming at simply protecting consumption levels may not be sufficient to restore the economic well-being provided by having full-time secure types of employment.

Consumption --- Income Distribution --- Inequality --- Living Standards --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Middle Class --- Perception --- Poverty --- Poverty Reduction --- Psychology --- Social Development --- Subjective Ranking --- Well-Being

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This paper describes new global evidence-derived from satellite data-for rates and patterns of urban spatial development since 1990 along three margins: horizontal spread (outward extension), infill development (inward additions in the gaps left between earlier structures), and vertical layering (upward construction). The end product of this growth is floor space, the amount and distribution of which are central to understanding how a city becomes livable and sustainable. Over the quarter century between 1990 and 2015, urban built-up area worldwide grew by 30 percent through horizontal spread and infill. While most cities grow through a combination of horizontal spread and infill, the paper provides the first estimates of the relative prominence of each type of expansion at different stages of economic development. In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, 90 percent of urban built-up area expansion occurs as horizontal spread. The study also finds that increasing incomes are a uniquely necessary condition for a rise in floor space per person through vertical layering: the reason is that building tall is capital intensive. The analysis highlights that if a city's population doubles but incomes stay constant, the city's floor space per person declines by 40 percent; by contrast, if per capita income doubles but population stays constant, the city's total floor space per person increases by 29 percent.

City Structure --- Land Use --- Municipal Housing and Land --- Satellite Imagery --- Transport Network --- Urban Development --- Urban Economic Development