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Investments in transport infrastructure lower trade costs and lead to integration of villages with urban markets. Does spatial market integration increase land inequality in rural areas Theoretical analysis by Braverman and Stiglitz (1989) suggests that the interactions of lower trade costs with credit market imperfections can increase land inequality. The primary mechanism is the adoption of increasing returns technology by large landowners facing lower trade costs which makes it more profitable to expand their scale by buying land from small, credit-constrained farmers. Using high- quality household survey data (the India Human Development Survey) on land ownership in rural districts of India, this paper provides the first evidence on the effects of market integration on land ownership inequality.
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Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size-a family of six needs three times as much as a family of two. This paper examines the sensitivity of global estimates of extreme poverty to changing this assumption. The analysis rests on nationally representative household surveys from 162 countries covering 98 percent of the population estimated to be in extreme poverty in 2017. The paper compares current-method estimates with a constant-elasticity scale adjustment that divides total household consumption or income not by household size but by the square root of household size. While the regional profile of extreme poverty is robust to this change, the determination of who is poor changes substantially-the poverty status of 270 million people changes. The paper then shows that the measure that accounts for economies of scale is significantly more correlated with a set of presumed poverty covariates (years of schooling, literacy, asset index, working in agriculture, access to electricity, piped drinking water, and improved sanitation).
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Does economic size matter for economic development outcomes? If so are current policies adequately addressing the role of size in the development process? Using working age population as a proxy for country size, Open and Nimble, systematically analyzes what makes small economies unique. Small economies are not necessarily prone to underdevelopment and in fact can achieve very high income levels. Small economies, however, do tend to be highly open to both international trade and foreign direct investment, have highly specialized export structures, and have large government expenditures relative to their Gross Domestic Product. The export structures of small economies are concentrated in a few products or services and in a small number of export destinations. In turn, this export concentration is associated with terms of trade volatility, which combined with high exposure to international trade, implies that small economies tend to face more volatility on average as external volatility permeates national economic life. Yet small economies tend to compensate for their export concentration by being nimble in the sense of being able to change their production and export structure relatively quickly over time. Moreover, limited territory plays a role in shaping how economies are affected by natural disasters, even when the probability of facing such disasters is not necessarily higher among small than among large economies. The combination of large governments with macroeconomic volatility seems to be associated with low national savings rates in small economies. This combination could be a challenge for long-term growth if productivity growth and foreign investment do not compensate for low domestic savings. The book finishes with some thoughts on how policy makers can respond to these issues through coordinated investments and regional integration efforts, as well as fiscal policy reforms aimed at both increasing public savings and conducting countercyclical fiscal policies.
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The term “resilience” originated in environmental studies and describes one’s biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. Regional economic resilience is defined as the capacity of a territory’s economy to resist and/or recover quickly from external shocks, often even improving on its prior situation (before the shock). The contributions in this book analyse different channels related to processes of mitigation (resistance–recovery) and adaptive resilience (reorientation–renewal), in a wide variety of geographical settings and scales. While the different chapters include relevant methodological advances in this literature, they also obtain relevant results from a policy perspective. Moreover, the wide spectrum of topics and analyses among the contributions in this book extend the current framework, to analyse regional economic resilience, from the intersection of several disciplines involving geographers, economists and demographers, as well as environmental scientists.
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