Is the World's Economic Center of Gravity Already in Asia?

Jean-Marie Grether and Nicole Mathys

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple measure of the World's Economic Center of Gravity (WECG) based on national GDP figures and the geographical location of the world's most important cities. This measure makes it possible to characterize the location of economic activity around the globe. It turns out that, over the 1975-2004 period, the WECG has shifted towards Asia, and the location of economic activity has become more evenly spread. On average, the distance to the WECG, which is highly correlated with the remoteness indicator frequently used in the trade gravity literature, has decreased more in Asian cities (-12%) and increased more in European cities (+16%).

Keywords: Geographical location of economic activity; center of gravity; spatial imbalances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/textes/08.03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lau:crdeep:08.03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie, Internef, CH-1015 Lausanne. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christina Seld ().