This paper examines whether decentralization increases the responsiveness of public investment to local needs using a unique database from Bolivia. Empirical tests show that investment patterns in human capital and social services changed significantly after decentralization. These changes are strongly and positively related to objective indicators of need. Nationally, these changes were driven...

This paper presents a model of industrialization through rural–urban interdependence. It shows how an economy with a low cost share of industrial inputs in agricultural production and a low expenditure share of manufactured goods, together with a limited variety of industrial inputs, can be caught in a low development trap. By escaping from the trap the economy moves toward more roundabout meth...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and that this indirect effect on incumbent employment leads to more jobs than what is created by the new...

Adopting a time series convergence definition and panel unit root testing procedures, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of no convergence in GDP per capita across former West German states. This result stands in contrast to the findings of previous studies for West German regions using cross-section regression techniques and is contrary to the time series findings for the United States. Fro...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense of this observation, featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use ...

Trade has been considered a condition for growth and development, a view that might have merits in explaining the rise of the Western world. I use a new data set from archival sources of eighteenth-century China to revisit this question. This analysis suggests previous studies of market integration, which attribute much growth to a reduction in transport costs, have overestimated these effects....

This paper investigates the spatial concentration of Chinese manufacturing using data collected in both the second and third national industrial censuses. It is found that many of China’s manufacturing industries were highly geographically concentrated in several coastal regions in 1995. A historical comparison of the concentration levels between 1980, 1985 and 1995 suggests that manufacturing ...

This paper evaluates the impact of access to groundwater on poverty using data from rural India. The estimation exploits the fact that the technology required to access groundwater changes exogenously due to constraints imposed by laws of physics at a depth of eight meters. I find that rural poverty in areas where depth from surface is below the cutoff is 9 to10 percent higher. Using survey dat...

Over the past several decades, significant efforts have been made to regulate the use of resource and pollution in most industrialized countries, and the stringency of pollution regulations has continued to increase globally. At the same time, physical and social infrastructures are influenced by changes in the use of resources which contribute to the wealth of many regions. Technical progress ...