Xie Xie, China

Total exports by Brazilian region in US$ (1995=100)

(HT Batistuta).

“Immigration and the origins of regional inequality: Government-sponsored European migration to Southern Brazil before World War I”.

Here goes the link to the new paper written by Irineu de Carvalho Filho (IMF) and I. Comments are welcome!

(Yep... vacations are over and I am blogging again...)

OECD Regional Statistics

Impressive. (HT Waldery Rodrigues Jr. and Patrícia Morita).

Walter Isard (1919-2010)

The founder of Regional Science has passed away. Here is his obituary.
Many thanks.

Regional policy in Europe

This article deals with an issue that has been on my mind for a long time: how to justify regional policies? The article is interesting, but I must say that it pays no attention to the Regional Science literature on the issue.

ERSA 2010

I am on my way to the 50th ERSA meeting ERSA in Sweden. The keynote speakers are amazing: Saxenian, Strange, Krugman, Fujita, Thisse, Venables e McCann.
I am going present my paper "Regional Inequality Frontier: Brazil (1872-2000)" and I hope to keep on posting here.

"The new economic geography, now middle-aged" by Krugman

Krugman's talk at the Association of American Geographers. (It happened two days ago. Oh boy, I do love the internet). Highly interesting, especially when he argues that NEG is still useful to understand contemporary issues:

"... new economic geography has a kind of steampunk feel, so that the stories it tells seem more suited to the U.S. economy of 1900 than that of 2010. Well, China is an economic powerhouse, but it’s still quite poor; .., China today appears to have roughly the same level of per capita GDP as the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.
And guess what? Chinese economic geography is highly reminiscent of the economic geography of advanced nations circa 1900 – and it fits gratifyingly well into the new economic geography framework."

(Via Brad Delong)

The Future of Regional Economics

A special issue of the Journal of Regional Science. Everybody is there: Duranton, Overman, Puga, Glaeser, Storper, Thisse...
I haven't read the papers, but the best title is: " The data avalanche is here: shouldn't we be digging?".
(HT Bruno Cruz)

Stylised facts about cities

An interesting presentation by Robert-Nicoud.

The bright side of transport costs: port wine

The area (Porto) itself is one of the oldest wine-growing regions in the world - officially demarcated back in 1756, a century before Bordeaux.
And port itself was created almost by mistake. To stop wine going bad on its sea journey to England, British traders fortified it with brandy.
The new sweet taste and extra kick was an immediate hit with those who could afford it.

Dafen

Dafen (China): 8,000 painters in 4 km^2 produce 5 million paintings/year. Picasso, Van Gogh, and Leonardo are reproduced at an industrial scale. More here. A sophisticated studio in Dafen.

Berlin's Wall as a natural experiment

Aqui.

Why do I learn French?

The reason is not the music, food or tourism. Some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Leroy-Beaulieu's De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1874) . It seems that he created the concept of "colonies of settlement" and "colonies of exploitation" (Roscher may have said something similar. I bought his book, but I gave up learning German 20 years ago). Every schoolboy in Brazil learns the diference between exploitation and settlement colonies thanks to Caio Prado Jr, a marxist historian. One day, I may write about the intelectual evolution of these concepts. A possible title of the paper: "From Roscher to Acemoglu"...Would anyone like to participate in this project?

(There was another reason to learn Frech: reading Thisse et al. textbook on Regional Economics, but I've just found out that it has been published in English as well. )

Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest, 1850-60

Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, Michael Haines, Robert A. Margo say:

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation improvements led economic development or simply followed. Using a newly developed GIS transportation database we examine this issue in the context of the American Midwest, focusing on two indicators of broader economic change, population density and the fraction of population living in urban areas. Our difference in differences estimates (supported by IV robustness checks) strongly suggest that the coming of the railroad had little or no impact upon population densities just as Albert Fishlow concluded some 40 years ago. BUT, our results also imply that the railroad was the "cause" of midwestern urbanization, accounting for more than half of the increase in the fraction of population living in urban areas during the 1850s.

That is exactly the kind of paper in economic history that I love. Lots of historical data + GIS database + econometrics= an answer to an interesting question.

Best economics paper of 1959

Following the tradition of this blog, here goes my choice of paper that celebrates its 50th year. There is Herbert Simon's paper, but my very personal choice goes to a work from Douglass North that does not rank among his most popular ones:

North, Douglass. "Agriculture in Regional Economic Growth. Journal of Farm Economics, v. 51, 943-51

He extends his 1955 paper, and shows the role of the distribution of wealth and the production function on long run regional growth. A must read for regional economists and economic historians.

Urbanization data for Brazil

A very nice piece on Zipf's Law in Brazil and in the US. Unfortunately there is a problem: the quality of the data on urbanization in Brazil. José Eli da Veiga has stressed how unreliable and insane are the 1938 official criteria on definition of urban areas in Brazil. Official data on urban population in Brazil is hugely overestimated and weirdly related to the number of municipalities created. Therefore, historical trends on urbanization in Brazil are unreliable and international comparisons should be avoided.
Recently, Embrapa used satellite images to identify urban areas and this is the best data that you can get. (The main limitation, obviously, is that there is no historical data)

Long-run spatial inequality in France: Evolution and determinants

Guess what? The regional inegalité is inverted-U shaped. Readhere.

8th Spatial Econometrics and Statistics workshop

Dear colleagues,

We are very pleased to invite you to Besançon, France, to participate to
the 8th edition of the Spatial Econometrics and Statistics Workshop,
which will be held on June 1-2, 2009. This workshop aims at reinforcing
and stimulating the interactions between well established and young
researchers involved in spatial statistics and econometrics.
Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome.

You are invited to submit your paper or long abstract (6 pages)
electronically to the following email address:
spatial2009@univ-fcomte.fr. The deadline for submission of
abstracts/papers is February 15th, 2009. Notification of acceptance will
be sent by March 20, 2009. The call for papers is enclosed.

More information concerning the workshop is available at :
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/index.htm or
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/english/home.htm

We are looking forward to meeting you in Besançon.

Best regards,
Julie Le Gallo

(for the scientific and organizing committees)

Why Krugman got the Nobel?

Dixit dixit.

Two links

The Brazilian Journal História e Economia has just released a new number. (Some papers are available in English).

IPEADATA - the main economic data repository in Brazil- has new looks and datasets. Many thanks to Eustáquio Reis and his team.