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New theoretical work on spatial concentration of industry – particularly the ‘new economic geography’ – has significantly helped us understanding why some regions develop more than others, why cities arise and where they are located. However, this work rarely incorporates Adam Smith’s observation that spatial differences in economic activity also reflect variations in physical geography, which ...

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...

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 ...

In my first progress report (Yeung, 2000a) I concluded that a more pluralistic industrial geography in recent years has gone beyond conventional economic issues by incorporating some ‘new’ economic knowledges and by providing good glimpses of alternative worlds of industrial change. This incorporation relates to the introduction of social and cultural understandings of conventional economic iss...

Since its very appearance, probably thanks to its provocative name, new economic geography (NEG) has stirred a debate on whether it is economic geography proper or rather geographical economics. In both cases, its real novelty has been questioned. We focus on this last issue. In particular, we argue that many NEG ideas have been around for a long time in the works of economic geographers and lo...