Workshop on climate, geography and African economic history

This week I attended an ERSA economic history workshop and want to briefly report just how interesting it was.The theme was climate, geography and African economic history and there were a number of interesting papers.

James Fenske (in a paper with Namrata Kala) spoke about climate and the slave trade. They examine the influence of African factors on the supply of slaves, specifically environmental shocks. They have port-level data for the transatlantic slave trade as well as temperature, climate and climate shocks. Places that were cooler had higher productivity, lower mortality and more slavery (than warmer regions that typically had more tse tse flies and malaria). In warmer (drier) years these places experienced climate shocks that increased the cost of slavery and reduced the supply of slaves. They then go on to link this to modern development outcomes using light density at night to proxy for economic activity. The areas around the ports that received cold temperature shocks at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade are poorer today! In other words, their better agricultural productivity could not make up for the fact that they lost more people to slavery and had the institutions that made them lose people to slavery. Check out James' web site for the paper, slides and a link to a Vox.EU post. The paper is also a great example of thorough work. It controls for everything and checks robustness from every angle.

Ed Kerby also presented interesting work in the Kenyan railways from a paper with Remi Jedwab and Alex Moradi.The full title is History, path dependence and development: Evidence from colonial railroads, settlers and cities in Kenya. Their focus is on urban emergence, persistence and optimality using the exogenous placement of the so-called "lunatic line" as a natural experiment. The analysis shows that colonial railroads causally determined the location of European settlers, which in turn decided the location of the main cities of the country at independence. Railroads declined and settlers left after independence, yet cities persisted. The paper has some really interesting data and use of "placebo lines" to test the robustness of the results. It is well worth the read if you are interested in economic geography and economic history.

Alfonso Herranz-Loncan and Johan Fourie also presented some first-round work on the social savings of the South African railways. It is a paper to look forward to as we talk about modern day extension of infrastructure in South Africa.

And there were some other interesting papers on local labour markets, on settlement patterns and on climate change in Africa. All round a big success (the people + the Noordhoek venue + the visit to the District 6 museum). A special word of thanks is due to ERSA and Johan Fourie for making the workshop possible.

History and GIS

This week I am at an ERSA organised workshop on the use of geographical information systems (GIS) in the analysis of economic history. For the occasion Johan Fourie brought out Alex Moradi of Sussex University and after the first afternoon there are already some interesting points to write about.

Alex explained that historical GIS is about structuring, mapping and analysing geographies of the past. It is a way of interrelating information from different sources - some of it spatial. GIS software can be used as a database management tool (layers are key), for analysing data (clustering, spatial autocorrelation) and visualising finished products (make your own maps). We will be learning more about that tomorrow.

For someone who is interested in geographical economics I found Alex's borders example interesting. Geography, like altitude or latitude variables are not really used as an explanatory variables, but rather as a way to help identify differences or discontinuities. I look forward to his inputs on our research ideas.

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ERSA workshop

This week I am attending the ERSA workshop Contemporary Analysis of International Trade. The workshop is built around what Jim Fairburn calls FUGSA - the Feenstra User Group SA - and Jim, Lawrence Edwards and Neil Rankin have been covering a number of topics in International Trade based on Feenstra's book.

 

On Monday Jim discussed the link between trade and growth in three parts:

• The links between trade and productivity,
• Growth and monopolistic competition, and
• The empirical evidence on trade and growth.

Neil Rankin followed with a presentation on models and evidence on firms and international trade. The key framework is the Mellitz model and building on an explanation of the model, Neil presented some interesting points:

• Few firms export and exporters are diffferent - they are typically large, established firms that are capital intensive and use high-skill labour, they are more productive and pay higher wages.
• Multi-product firms that exporting to multiple countries are rare, but they contribute the bulk of the value of exports.
• There are more single-product firms exporting to a single country but the values are low.
• Exporters are significant importers of inputs.

This simplifies a much longer and involved explanation of firms and trade, but clearly raises some interesting issues:

• Is it self-selection or can exporters learn by doing? Who are the so-called "born global" firms?
• Looking at U.S. evidence it does not seem to help to aid or develop small-firm exporters. Policy should rather support firms to grow big and some will export.
• If exporters import inputs it does not seem to be sensible to weaken the exchange rate to support exporters.

Today saw presentations on anti-dumping, micro-evidence on price setting and product market evidence of African integration, but I accidentally deleted my UPAD notes and won't comment off the cuff anymore than saying it was interesting. If the slides are shared, I'll add the stories!