In Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World

Douglas Gollin (), Martina Kirchberger and David Lagakos

No 23916, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In most developing countries, there is a large gap in average consumption per capita between urban and rural areas. One appealing interpretation of this gap is that it reflects a spatial equilibrium, in which the higher consumption levels of urban areas are offset by lower non-monetary amenities. In this paper, we draw on new high-resolution evidence to document how non-monetary amenities vary across space within 20 developing countries. We focus on measures of health, public goods, crime and pollution. These vary substantially across locations within countries and can be carefully measured with highly comparable data. We find that in almost all countries, and for almost all measures, the quality of these amenities is non-decreasing in population density. In addition, net internal migration flows are directed toward denser areas in every country. These findings are hard to reconcile with a spatial equilibrium. Instead, they suggest that developing countries are undergoing a reallocation of workers to densely populated areas, consistent with many models of structural change but inconsistent with models that assume a simple static spatial equilibrium.

JEL-codes: E0 O11 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-mac and nep-ure
Note: DEV EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23916.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: In Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World (2017)
Working Paper: In Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23916

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23916

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().