The World Development Report 2009 ‘reshapes economic geography’: geographical reflections

By and large, geographers have had little to say about the World Bank's annual flagship World Development Reports (WDRs). However, with the just published WDR 2009 (hereafter referred to as the Report), things might be different, for it claims to be concerned with nothing less than ‘reshaping economic geography’. In his foreword, the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, writes that he expects ‘Reshaping Economic Geography will stimulate a much-needed discussion on the desirability of “balanced growth”, which has proved elusive. And by informing some important policy debates, it will point the way towards a more inclusive and sustainable development’ (World Bank 2009, xiii). On the face of it, many geographers will welcome the Report, not least because it takes issues of space seriously: ‘This Report advances the influence of geography on economic opportunity by elevating space and place from mere undercurrents in policy to a major focus’ (World Bank 2009, 2). Placing the spatial dimensions of economic development centre stage, and recognising the reality and importance of spatial unevenness in development potentials and outcomes, may be reassuring. However, this welcome should perhaps be tempered by a concern for how an institution dominated by economists might handle geography. To put it another way, how does the World Bank – in the guise of this Report –‘do’ geography? What does it say, who does it cite, what does it omit – and does all this make any difference? The Report focuses on the spatial transformations that must happen for countries to develop. Cities, migration and trade, it is claimed, have been the main catalysts of progress and hence ‘Growing cities, ever more mobile people, and increasingly specialised products are ... essential for economic success’ (World Bank 2009, xx). These greater densities, shorter distances and reduced divisions will, the Report argues, bring about unbalanced growth: however, over time, other policies and mechanisms for integration will foster convergence in living standards. Development, seen through the Report's eyes, involves a necessary (and welcome) spatial unevenness in economic activity coupled with progressive spatial evenness in human welfare. This view is both positive (in that it reflects the way the Report reads economic history) and normative (in that the Report argues that this is how things should be). The key policy challenge is to accelerate economic divergence while reducing the time taken for welfare convergence. A clear set of organising principles runs through the Report from beginning to end. The notion of ‘Development in 3-D’, meaning the intersection of Density, Distance and Division, lies at the heart of the conceptual framework laid out in Part One of the Report (with each ‘D’ the topic of a separate chapter). These three dimensions of development ‘are easy metaphors, since density, distance, and division summon images of human, physical, and political geography’ (World Bank 2009, 6). The Report claims that by promoting transformations along these three dimensions, some places are doing well. Higher densities due to urbanisation, shorter distances as people and businesses move to cities, and fewer divisions as economic borders are thinned and world markets entered, are ‘the changes that will help developing nations’ (World Bank 2009, xx). Corresponding to these three dimensions (referred to as ‘facts’) are three drivers of change: agglomeration, migration and specialisation with trade. Part Two of the Report, more descriptive in tone, dedicates a chapter to the transformations affected by each of these drivers. These drivers in turn define three corresponding domains for policy: urbanisation, territorial development and regional integration, the themes of Part Three. Structuring the Report around these groups of three has the effect, the authors suggest, that it can be read ‘by part or policy’. The reader interested in concepts can read just Part one, while people interested in agglomeration can read the Report ‘vertically’, looking only at the chapters on Density, Agglomeration and Scale Economies and Urbanisation policies. Whilst this clear structure is helpful to the reader, the continuous use of tripartite divisions throughout the Report gives the impression that the desire for simplicity of structure may be obscuring complexity of experience and, therefore, is rather suspect. In terms of policy responses, density is seen to operate most powerfully at the local level, distance is the most critical dimension at the national level, and division is the most important dimension at the international level. Governments can intervene to reduce spatial disparities through three types of instrument: institutions (which should be spatially blind and universal in coverage), infrastructure (to drive spatial connection) and incentives (which are spatially targeted interventions). The preference is for policies to focus on spatially blind institutional interventions. Consistent with recent trends in multilateral lending, the Report is also supportive of infrastructural investments. It is most diffident about spatially targeted interventions to foster economic activity on the grounds that historically they have failed to offset tendencies toward economic concentration. The Report is packed full of examples drawn from across the world and, unlike many preceding WDRs, this one is particularly concerned to draw inspiration from advanced as well as developing economies. This approach to the use of example has two consequences. It allows the authors to put their stylised facts and 3-D structure ‘in place’– indeed, they claim that ‘Place is the most important correlate of a person's welfare’ (World Bank 2009, 1). Second, it gives the Report a vaguely evolutionist feel. It is hard to escape the sense that, in the final instance, the experiences of the US and (to a lesser extent) Europe and contemporary China offer models from which the rest of the world ought to learn. Thus one encounters sections entitled ‘Overcoming distance in North America’ (pp. 45–6), ‘Overcoming division in Western Europe’ (pp. 122–4), and ‘Distance and division in East Asia’ (pp. 194–6), which are positive in tone and therefore become exemplar experiences. The African regional vignette, by contrast, highlights multiple disadvantages: Sub-Saharan Africa today suffers from the triple disadvantages of low density, long distance, and deep division that put the continent at a developmental disadvantage. These spatial dimensions reduce proximity between economic agents within Sub-Saharan Africa, and between Africa and the rest of the world. ‘Cumulative causation’ between these forces catches many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in a ‘proximity trap’. (World Bank 2009, 283) The Report purports to re-energise geography's place in understanding economic and human development. In this section we reflect on the literatures that are cited in the Report, the approach that is taken and the evidence that is deployed to make the case. What, in other words, is the disciplinary span, the historical reach and the evidential substance of the Report? The main perspective adopted in the Report derives from the relatively new and growing body of literature known as ‘new economic geography’. The inspiration for this literature is not the discipline of geography. Economists’ theoretical constructs have avoided reference to existing economic geography. Instead they have theorised agglomeration with the intention of revising neo-classical equilibrium models to take scale into account. New economic geography theorists see their initiative as a major contribution to economics as a discipline by helping to resolve the distortions of market imperfections that have plagued modelling exercises. Scale, it is believed, adds complexity and most importantly realism to their analyses. This view has been validated by the award of a Nobel prize to Paul Krugman this year for his pioneering work in new economic geography. Few geographers would claim to be the fount of all wisdom on the spatial dimensions of development, but one would have thought that the discipline had something relevant to say as well. Yet this report cites scarcely any geographers – neither those early analysts of the relationships between space, economy and society, nor subsequent critics and innovators. Consider some of the more startling gaps. There is considerable discussion of the role of secondary urban centres in the Report but no mention of Dennis Rondinelli's work on secondary cities and area development. Much play is made in Chapter 7 on the possibility of fostering ‘Concentration without congestion’, but no reference is made to Terry McGee's pioneering work on extended metropolitan regions in Asia. Tracking back in time, a geographer might also have expected some reference to early work on spatial location such as that by Peter Haggett,2 Peter Gould or Dick Chorley, to name just three. All this is absent. Even more remarkably, Gunner Myrdal's work on circular and cumulative causation (despite circular causation being one of the Report's ‘stylized facts’) is ignored, as too is Michael Lipton's work on urban bias, and all the literature by earlier development economists and others that followed his key contribution. Among more recent authors, Doreen Massey's sustained, critical (but also practically engaged) interpretations of regional inequality and policy merit no comment. Nor will one find here serious engagement with the work of Allen Scott, Peter Dicken, or any number of geographers3 who have a great deal to say about the issues addressed in the Report, and whose work can hardly be dismissed as irrelevant to policy, or as unduly critical of orthodox institutions. As a result, the Report appears, to geographers at least, academically narrow and historically shallow. It gives the impression that scholarship on economic geography began in the last decade or so. The result is that at times ‘old’ issues and debates are presented as ‘new’ insights (cf. Martin 2008). This, in turn, means that the evolution of scholarship and understanding has been underplayed in general, and often overlooked entirely. Had the authors of the Report taken the time to read these geographical and historical literatures and cast their net more widely, they could have made some of the discussion both stronger and more nuanced. The Report's enthusiastic discovery of central place theory could, for instance, have been tempered by the longstanding professional experience of previous agglomeration modellers from geography who know all too well the complexities of urban growth and welfare. 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