A simple two-country model of economic geography is constructed in order to examine the effect of tariff competition on the spatial distribution of manufacturing activities as well as on welfare. We show that when the transport cost is sufficiently small, tariff competition with firm migration leads to a core-periphery economy, where one of the two countries imposes no tariff in Nash equilibriu...

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A substantial part of the economic growth literature suggests that historically, geographic features such as decreasing trade costs have not only enhanced output, but may also be associated with rapid urbanization and ’growth take-offs’. However, this literature lacks an analytical motivation for lower transport costs, and assumes their decrease to obtain exogenously and at no cost: It thus doe...

We show that geography, through its impact on history, can have important effects on economic development today. The analysis focuses on the historic interaction between ruggedness and Africa’s slave trades. Although rugged terrain hinders trade and most productive activities, negatively affecting income globally, rugged terrain within Africa afforded protection to those being raided during the...

There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing returns model of economic geography featuring ‘home market effects’ with that o...

Geography vs. Institutions at the Village Level There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on crosscountry regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot easily be controlled for. The innovation of Acemoglu, J...

This paper presents the effects of climate, topography, and natural ecology on public health, nutrition, demographics, technological diffusion, international trade and other determinants of economic development in Africa. The goal of this paper is to emphasize the need for intensified research on the issues at the intersection of ecology and human society. Geography was given emphasis because ...