Featured paper · 2022
Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development
The report builds an analytic framework for judging place-based and spatially targeted policies in developing countries. It warns that many cities show sterile agglomeration, where people concentrate without the expected productivity gains, so infrastructure spending alone rarely delivers the promised regional development.
Arti Grover, Somik Lall, William F. Maloney. World Bank Productivity Project, 2022.
The policy line
Spatially targeted policies pay off only where the conditions for productive agglomeration already exist; infrastructure by itself will not create them.
Summary
The report builds an analytic framework for judging place-based and spatially targeted policies in developing countries. It warns that many cities show sterile agglomeration, where people concentrate without the expected productivity gains, so infrastructure spending alone rarely delivers the promised regional development.
The full text is available at the publisher.
