Background Papers

Behar, Alberto. " Neighbourhood growth effects: an annual panel data approach."

Brülhart, Marius. " An Account of Global Intra-Industry Trade, 1962-2006." - 2008
This paper provides a comprehensive description of intra-industry trade patterns and trends, using data on more than 39 million bilateral trade flows. In 2006, 27 percent of global trade was intraindustry if measured at the finest (5-digit) level of statistical aggregation, and 44 percent if measured at a coarser (3-digit) level of statistical aggregation. The observed steady growth in global intra-industry trade since the early 1960s suggests a process of world-wide structural convergence: economies are becoming more similar over time in terms of their sectoral compositions. In particular since the 1990s, this trend appears to be driven to a significant extent by the international fragmentation of vertical production chains. Intra-industry trade is a highincome and middle-income country phenomenon: African trade remains overwhelmingly of the inter-industry type. Moreover, the observed increase in intra-industry trade was not accompanied by a comparable increase in marginal intra-industry trade, suggesting that trade-induced adjustment pressures remain potentially important.

Calì, Massimiliano. " Urbanisation, inequality and economic growth: Evidence from Indian states."- 2007
The aim of this empirical work is to explore various possible implications of the urbanisation process on development outcomes. I investigate these issues in an intra-country rather than in a traditional cross-country setting, using Indian states over the Post-Independence period and Indian towns over the 21st century as the units of analysis. I exploit the richness of contexts within the Indian sub-continent, controlling for many of those countries’ unobservables that undermine the robustness of inferences from cross-countries studies.
India has a number of features that make it particularly amenable to this type of empirical verification. First, it is a federal country composed of several states with a fairly high degree of political autonomy, which allows for some state-wise variability in policy variables.
Second, the size of the major states is similar in terms of both population and geographical extension to that of medium-large countries.

Clemens, Michael, C. Montenegro, and L. Pritchett. " The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers accross US Borders."

Coulibaly, Souleymane. " On the Complementarity of Regional and Global Trade."

Crafts, Nicholas. " European Growth in the Age of Regional Economic Integration: Convergence Big Time?"

Hewings, Geoffrey J.D., Edward Feser, and Ken Poole. " Spatial/Territorial Development Policies in the United States."

Hirotsugu, Uchida and Andrew Nelson. " Agglomeration Index: Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration." - 2008
A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of “urban,” resulting in inconsistencies. This situation is particularly troublesome if one wishes to conduct a cross-country analysis or determine the aggregate urbanization status of the regions (such as Asia or Latin America) and the world. This paper proposes an alternative measure of urban concentration that we call an agglomeration index. It is based on three factors: population density, the population of a “large” urban center, and travel time to that large urban center. The main objective in constructing this new measure is to provide a globally consistent definition of settlement concentration to conduct cross-country comparative and aggregated analyses in the same way that the $1 per day poverty line is used in poverty issues-related studies. As an accessible measure of economic density, the agglomeration index lends itself to the study of concepts such as agglomeration rents in urban areas, the “thickness” of a market, and the travel distance to such a market with many workers and consumers. With anticipated advances in remote sensing technology and geo-coded data analysis tools, the agglomeration index can be further refined to address some of the caveats currently associated with it.

Kilroy, Austin. " Intra-urban spatial inequalities: cities as ‘urban regions.’"- 2007
This section gives an overview of the forces and characteristics of intra-urban spatial inequalities, before the subsequent main section examines the mechanisms by which they have significance for economic development.
Spatial inequalities within urban areas are a natural consequence of income inequalities between households. Standard urban economic theory explains the spatial patterning of cities in term of bid-rent curves and other models of location decisions. These mechanisms give rise to the predominant clustering of residences by income, with those locations determined according to the desirability of residence location and households’ abilities to afford land in that location. Until the 20th century—in the era before motorised transport—the costs of intra-urban communication encouraged the concentration of residences, services and even light manufacturing in the centres of cities.