From Clio Infrastructure

Geography and Environment

New Economic Geography emphasises that a location’s economic development does not take place in isolation, but is heavily intertwined with developments elsewhere. Because of the interaction between on the one hand, transport costs, and externalities and scale effects on the other hand, developments in one region/country can have a major impact on developments elsewhere.

For a better understanding of the spatial and environmental factors influencing patterns of divergence and convergence in the world economy, three different sets of data will be collected by the central datahub. First, data on first order geography can be easily be collected and made available, because these features hardly change over time (think of location near the sea, in the tropics, etc). Factor endowments are somewhat more difficult to measure, but are also relatively easy to ascertain. The aim is also to include in the final dataset a number of environmental factors, such as long term changes in average temperatures, short term changes in growing conditions as they can be read from, for example, dendrochronological time series, and estimates of the emissions of CO2 (and perhaps other pollutants).

First order geography:

 distance to equator 
 latitude and longitude
 average temperature and average rainfall (recent data)
 landlocked or not
 geographical size of area
 length of seashore
 ratio seashore/size of country
 settler mortality (disease environment more in general)</nowiki> 

Factor Endowments (in benchmark years, per century)

 population density (population per km2 or land or per km2 of agricultural land)
 agricultural land (total and per head, and as share of total land area)
 mineral resources (oil, coal) 

Environmental factors

 changes in climate during past 500/1000 years
 production/consumption of energy
 emissions of CO2 

Second order geography:

 distance to London/England (as the origin of the Industrial Revolution), and other important economic centres
 transport costs, one of the central elements of new economic geography, charting their development over time for different transport modes (collected by the wages and prices hub)
 Optional: patterns of trade, FDI, capital mobility, migration