World Bank (publ);
World Development Report 2009 : Reshaping Economic Geography (WDR 2009)
World Bank Publications, 2008, 300 pages
ISBN 9780821376072
topics: | world | econ | reference | urban
The day will come when you France, you Russia, you Germany, all you nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, you will merge into a superior unit, and you will constitute [an] European fraternity. —Victor Hugo, 1849 International Peace Congress; was laughed at. p. 147
WW2: cost Germany and Italy four or more decades of growth and put Austrian and French gross domestic products (GDPs) back to levels of the nineteenth century. Overcoming division and its dramatic consequences was the objective of European leaders after World War II. Destructive nationalism — and its economic dimension, protectionism— were indeed partly blamed for the disaster. Economic integration was thus viewed as the best way to avoid another war. That it should come through peaceful means and with the main objective of maintaining peace was — and remains — a unique endeavor. In this respect, European integration is a clear success. But it was not clear in the 1940s and 1950s that this vision of "Peace through Integration" would succeed, particularly because it came at the same time as the Cold War's division between the East and the West. Marshall Plan: its mandate was to reduce trade barriers, particularly quota restrictions. Europe in the early postwar years was a tariffand quota-ridden economy. Removing trade barriers fostered the rapid growth of trade. Between 1950 and 1958, manufacturing exports grew by almost 20 percent a year in West Germany, 9.2 percent in Italy, and 3.8 percent in France. ... avg annual GDP growth was 7.8 percent in West Germany, 5 percent in Italy, and 4.4 percent in France. p.147 [Map G2.1 - current European union - is very interesting in how it leaves a hole where Yugoslavia is - Hungary and Greece, further east, are included. Also, Norway Switzld - not in Union. ]
Mostly off the world's radar, on a dusty plain in West Africa, is a city of 1.6 million people. Bisected by the River Niger, its two halves— with about 800,000 people each — are linked by only two bridges. The pressure of movement is so strong that every morning one of these bridges is dedicated to incoming traffic: minibuses, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians, and occasionally private cars. In the evenings, to leave the center means joining an exodus of people toward the minibus depots. Green vans loaded with passengers file out to residential neighborhoods as far as 20 kilometers away. This is Bamako, Mali. It contracts into its center every morning and breathes out again in the evening. With each breath Bamako grows bigger. It happens to be one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Natural demographic growth is supplemented by migration from the countryside and other Malian cities. Its population in 2008 is 50 percent larger than 10 years ago, making it the same size as Budapest, Dubai, or Warsaw. It has 10 times more inhabitants than the next biggest Malian city and accommodates 70 percent of the country's industrial establishments.1 New neighborhoods — quartiers — formerly villages, become consolidated with the rest of the city, toward the south, east, and west. Despite its industriousness, Bamako is one of the sleepier cities in West Africa. Many of the manufactured staples come 1,184 kilometers by road from one of the region's metropolises, Abidjan, which has more than twice Bamako's population. Abidjan seems small beside Lagos, where activity is so concentrated that its residents speak of living in a pressure-cooker. Some families rent rooms to sleep for six hours and then turn them over to another family that takes their place. Shopping does not necessarily require travel: goods are brought on foot and cart to drivers stuck in Lagos's interminable traffic jams. To some, like the authors of Lagos's 1980 master plan written when the city had just 2.5 million residents, the continuing growth of the city is "undisciplined."2 What can possibly be so attractive about living in Lagos that, despite its congestion and crime, it continues to draw migrants?
The short answer: economic density. Lagos is not the most economically dense city in the world, nor even the most densely populated. Those distinctions belong to Central London and Mumbai, respectively. Even so, Nigeria's economic future and Lagos's growth are as inextricably tied as Britain's economy is with London's growth. No country has developed without the growth of its cities. As countries become richer, economic activity becomes more densely packed into towns, cities, and metropolises. Jane Jacobs, the noted urbanist, did not have Bamako and Lagos in mind when she wrote, "A metropolitan economy, if it's working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. Cities don't lure the middle class. They create it."3 She might as well have written: as Lagos and Bamako grow, they will fill in West Africa's missing middle. Map 1.1 The landscape of economic mass is bumpy, even in a small country like Belgium The rank-size rule, discovered in 1913, can be expressed as the rank r associated with a city of size S is proportional to S to some negative power. The special case in which the estimated power equals –1 is known as Zipf's law, named after a linguist, George Zipf Korea: study on Urban-rural divide - GDP: p. 101 Seoul is at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Located 50 kilometers from the Republic of Korea's border with the Democratic Republic of Korea in the Han River basin, it is the country's capital and home to a quarter of its population (that is, 9.76 million people). At the bottom of the hierarchy, Jeongeup and Sunchang, both in the Jeonbuk province, are close to the interface between rural and urban. So while Jeongeup has a relatively large population (129,050), one in four of its inhabitants is a farmer.
map 2.2: travel time in hours to cities of > 50k, by subnational administrative area; darker areas = longer travel time. India, E. China, Europe, E. USA, all < 2 hours. E. China, Siberia, N. Africa, N. Canada - high. 101 Economic distance is not the same as Euclidean distance. map 2.1: Based on straight-line distance, most of India is well connected to markets in dense settlements. But people in many parts of India have difficulty getting to markets because of the travel time, determined by the type and quality of roads and other transport infrastructure. p.100
Map 3.2 Some borders are much thicker than others - and the regions with thick borders - Africa, S. Asia, C. Asia etc - are also among the poorest nations. p.98 We can change history but not geography. We can change our friends but not our neighbors. - Atal Behari Vajpayee, 1999 [argues that in a technological world, countries can change their nbrhoods - post WW2, Japan and the USA became close neighbours by forging extensive transpor linkages p. 121] The economic benefits from more migration could be great.20 The pool of potential migrants is likely to remain large given prevailing wage differentials between poor and rich countries, three to four times those triggering the mass migration of Europeans to North America in the late-nineteenth century. p. 125 Capital restrictions - highest in Central / West Africa; next is S. Asia, S. and N. Africa; C. Asia, Caucasus, Turkey; and lowest in S. America and OECD nations; Tariffs are also highest in these nations p. 124 fig3.3/127 Language diversity: highest near equator - > 200 lgs per 1million km² - whereas around 45N it is about 20, and 45S it is about 5. - p. 129. Also - striking graphic of language diversity in Africa Map 2.4, p. 129
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