Distance, skill deepening and development : will peripheral countries ever get rich?

Redding, Stephen and Schott, Peter K (2003) Distance, skill deepening and development : will peripheral countries ever get rich? Journal of Development Economics, 72 (2). 515 -541. ISSN 0304-3878

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Abstract

This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to remunerate domestic factors of production. If skill-intensive sectors have higher trade costs, more pervasive input–output linkages or stronger increasing returns to scale, we show theoretically that remoteness depresses the skill premium and therefore incentives for human capital accumulation. Empirically, we exploit structural relationships from the model to demonstrate that countries with lower market access have lower levels of educational attainment. We also show that the world's most peripheral countries are becoming increasingly economically remote over time.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescriptio...
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2003 Elsevier B.V. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance STICERD Economics
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Date Deposited:	30 Jun 2006
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2024 00:07
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/207

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