Las instituciones son relevantes para el desarrollo, pero no lo son todo. Recientemente, Vernon Henderson, Tim Squires, Adam Storeygard y David Weil publicaron TheGlobal Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade. En el abstract leemos: "We
study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night,
across 250,000 grid cells of average are 560 kilometers. We first document that
nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical
geography attributes. A full set of country indicators only explains a further 10%.
When we divide geographic characteristics into two groups, those primarily
important for agriculture and those primarily important for trade, we find that
the agriculture variable have relatively more explanatory power in countries
that developed early and the trade variable have relatively more in countries
that developed late, despite the fact that the latter group of countries are
far more dependent on agriculture today. We explain this apparent puzzle in a
model in which two technological shocks occur, one increasing agricultural
productivity and the other decreasing transportation costs, and in which
agglomeration economies lead to persistence in urban locations. In countries
that developed early, structural transformation due to rising agricultural productivity
began at a time when transport costs were still relatively high, so urban
agglomerations were localized in agricultural regions. When transport costs
fell well before structural transformation. To exploit urban scale economies,
manufacturing agglomerated in relatively few, often coastal, locations. With
structural transformation, these initial coastal locations grew, without
formation of more cities in the agricultural interior."
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