The Political Demand: Spatial Equity without Compromising Productivity
clustering of low-welfare people could lead to a number of sociopolitical phenomena: • Perceived spatial injustice. The residents of Country B’s southeastern province may conclude that their birth location has deprived them of opportunity, through no fault of their own effort or ability. • Perceived spatial agency of the state. It may be inferred that Country B’s government and those who hold political power are in some way responsible for the lagging area status of the southeastern province. • Spatial political association. Residents of Country B’s southeastern province may form geographically based political ties in order to further their perceived common grievances. Ethnic and religious divisions may provide a framework for political association, in which case the spatial disparities become particularly worrisome (Kanbur and Venables 2005). • Spatial social and political reorganization. Natives of Country B’s southeast province may migrate north and west in order to share in the higher incomes of other regions. Internal migration might involve the reconfiguration of family and social networks; informal social protection systems; patronage systems and political allegiances; a shift in power; and the spatial redistribution of ethnic, religious, and age groupings. Any of these rearrangements of the existing order could be perceived as a source of sociopolitical stress in Country B’s four provinces. As the UN-WIDER study on spatial inequality (Kanbur and Venables 2005) concluded, “Even when spatial units do not represent ethnic or other cleavages, but command the allegiance of the population as political entities, increasing disparities in group averages may lead to tensions and conflict.” These sociopolitical phenomena are real. MENA politicians’ concern about them is genuine.3 Tackling them is a political imperative, as we shall see. But tackling them in the wrong way can impose an unacceptable cost upon national development.
MENA Needs Economic Agglomeration MENA needs the spatial concentration of productive activity. No country has ever achieved developed-country status without urbanizing. Even the populations of great agricultural exporters such as Australia, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and Uruguay are more than 85 percent urbanized.
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