Toward a microeconomics of growth

Robin Burgess and Anthony Venables

No 3257, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: What drives growth at the microeconomic level? The authors divide the factors that determine a location's growth performance into two groups,"1st advantage"and"2nd advantage."The term 1st advantage refers to the conditions that provide the environment in which new activities can be profitably developed, including most of the factors on which traditional theory has focused, such as access to inputs (labor and capital), access to markets, provision of basic infrastructure, and the institutional environment. The term 2nd advantage refers to factors that increase returns to scale and can lead to cumulative causation processes. They may be acquired by learning, through technological spillovers, or by the development of thick markets of suppliers and local skills. The authors'analysis suggests that empirical investigation of the drivers of growth must shift down to a more microeconomic level. Such an analysis has become more feasible as data at the subnational level have become more available. By viewing recent empirical evidence on drivers of growth through their analytical framework, the authors are able to begin to sketch out a microeconomic agenda for growth. They emphasize that it is the manner in which 1st and 2nd advantages interact that shapes the pattern of development. The authors then turn to the example of how policy has affected manufacturing growth performance in India. They analyze links between the direction of state-level labor regulation and growth in the organized manufacturing sector, how state-led expansion of bank branches into rural areas has affected unregistered or informal manufacturing, and how the pre-reform technological capability of industries affected their response to liberalization in 1991. The analysis suggests that policy choices at the local level affect growth. Both theory and empirics need to downshift to the microeconomic level if we are to make advances in identifying specific means of encouraging innovation and growth.

Keywords: Environmental Economics&Policies; Health Economics&Finance; Economic Theory&Research; Labor Policies; Decentralization; Environmental Economics&Policies; Economic Theory&Research; Health Economics&Finance; Governance Indicators; Achieving Shared Growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... DF/wps3257toward.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:wbk:wbrwps:3257

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().