9. Conclusion
Concluding Remarks Myriad factors support a successful place. Cortés’s wonder upon entering Tenochtitlán extended from the superiority of the roads and canals that connected it, to the skills required to build the magnificent temples and plazas, to the extensive markets supplying every need, to the system of magistrates who resolved commercial disputes and the auditors who verified weights and measures. It was a clear explication not only of why the city endured, but also of how different elements worked together to form a great and productive place. Not only did the hard infrastructure such as roads and the built environment matter, but the softer elements—liquid markets, ample skills, and wellfunctioning institutions—were essential, as well. Such successful urban concentrations tend to persist, importantly anchoring the distribution of economic activity across countries over long periods of time. Economic geography is lumpy and persistent, and efficiently so. However, inequalities also tend to persist, with some lagging regions never catching up. The persistence of the spatial landscape—whether over centuries, as in the case of the Aztec capital, or thousands of years, in the case of Japan, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa—moderates ambitions of radically reshaping it. Other regions and localities, by contrast, have had their underlying fundamentals undermined by shocks such as automation, trade, or climate change, leading to contraction, joblessness and its correlates, and political instability. The demands to “do something” about these regions features importantly on policy agendas. Altering economic geography means first understanding its drivers. This volume explores the three main drivers—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance— and discusses how the ways in which they interact have evolved over the past century in developing countries. As for agglomeration—aside from examples like ancient Tenochtitlán and modern-day Shenzhen, China—many cites in developing countries appear to be less productively concentrated than merely crowded, accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization in terms of crime, congestion, and pollution, without the productivity gains that traditionally have pulled along national development. The original analysis done for this volume shows that, in fact, the productivity gains from agglomeration in many developing countries are effectively zero, while congestion costs are rising steeply. This is partly a result of premature urbanization: that is,
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