Conclusion

learned about the need to have all components functioning (Zandstra et al. 1979). However, in the first phase of the Rural Development Investment Program, governments in some departments found it more politically compelling to give the separate components to distinct villages, thereby invalidating the initial concept, and high-level bureaucratic competition led to fragmentation in practice. The second phase relocated the program to areas with better infrastructure and higher levels of human capital, thereby de facto lowering the dimensionality of the program (Maloney 1983; Lacroix 1985). However, this tactical retreat also implied leaving areas that required more than the manageable number of programs.

Conclusion

That growth is uneven across space raises concerns for lagging places and those populations left behind, either by development or by the loss of a previous anchor industry. The three elements of spatial dynamics discussed in the preceding chapters lay out how many places, even if supported by policies, may not have a comparative advantage, and may not be viable. In practice, existing natural and human-built endowments can be considered complements to policy packages. Such endowments lie along a continuum and determine the rate of return and viability of those policy packages. When approaching a lagging place, the first question that needs to be asked is “Why are capital and technology not flowing there already?” The answer may be, as in Kolmanskop or US ghost mining towns, that their distance and lack of a source of comparative advantage simply makes them nonviable.

In these cases, programs leading to an orderly and humane process of encouraging migration are likely to be the better option, along with income support across the transition, as a recent World Bank study (Stanley et al. 2018) concluded for contracting mining towns around the world. As World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank 2009) argues, it is better to invest in people, not places. However, the earlier discussion shows that such decisions are not so clear cut. First, many developing country cities do not appear to show the gains in productivity expected from increased density: they are simply crowded. More people migrating to cities to take advantage of better service provision, for example, just moves a problem of human need from one place to another. For migration to reach its potential as an antipoverty tool, the process of structural transformation and growth must be advancing robustly.

Second, people move less than expected for a variety of reasons. Some of these have to do with lack of information or the wrong skills, and these can be addressed. Others relating to attachment to place, nonportable assets like real estate, or age are less easily remedied. Whatever the case, the political pressures to do something for a lagging or shocked region can be intense. What this chapter has sought to emphasize is that there are trade-offs. Investing in regions that are low along the viability continuum, or