Sahabat Referensiers, Sekedar meramaikan diskusi yang sudah lama saya tidak ikuti secara aktif. Tentang Pembangunan Wilayah, pandangan pak Risfan tentang governance (institusi) ditambah lagi dengan pandangan rekan Eko dan Pak Eka tentang geografi, saya jadi teringat kejadian beberapa tahun lalu. Rekan rekan di kampus bikin semacam usulan, siapa kira-kira pemenang hadiah Nobel Ilmu Ekonomi ke depan. Masuklah salah satu nominasi, Rodrik, professor ekonomi dari Harvard. Jika kejadian, Rodrik termasuk orang kedua setelah Krugman yang mengatakan bahwa "geography does matter".
Mohon maaf kalau potongan referensi yang saya posting berikut kurang relevan dengan topik diskusi. THE EFFECTS OF POLICY, INSTITUTIONS AND GEOGRAPHY ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN AFRICA: AN ECONOMETRIC STUDY BASED ON CROSS-SECTION AND PANEL DATA W. A. NAUDE (2004). Journal of International Development 16: 821–849 *Geography* * * Although the main proponents of the ‘policy failure’ explanations for Africa’s slow growth recognizes that geography can adversely affect Africa’s growth, they have tended to stick with the belief that despite geography it ‘is not destiny that determined Africa’s growth during the past 30 years but policy failures’ (Hoeffler, 2002, p. 156). Increasingly however, a substantial case has been made that geography does matter, particularly in Africa. This is part of a greater concern in the general economics literature on the importance of spatial dynamics in the economic growth and development process (see e.g. Krugman). For instance, Devarajan et al. (2003) recently found evidence that investment has not been the major constraint on development in Africa,5 and that Africa’s low investment and economic growth is symptoms of deeper underlying factors. Rodrik et al. (2002) also questions the explanation of ‘policy failure’ leading to low investment, stating that they are ‘at best proximate causes of economic growth’, and that the ‘deeper’ causes of growth need to be identified in order to ask the question why economic policies are better in one country than another. One of the so-called ‘deeper’ underlying causes of economic growth is geography, which can have an impact on policy and on the convergence of incomes across the world. Geography determines climate, endowments of natural resources, disease burden, transport costs ad diffusion of new innovations. It will directly affect agricultural productivity and health, and indirectly impact on the economy through distance and the quality of institutions. Geography is, as Rodrik et al. (2002, p. 2) remark ‘as exogenous a determinant as an economist can ever hope to get’. Masters and McMillan (2000, p. 10) finds that countries located in temperate climate zones are converging towards income levels that are conditional only on their policy choices, while in tropical countries (i.e. many of those in Africa) convergence is conditional on their ability to achieve economies of scale—through for instance larger urban agglomeration, more homogenous populations and greater integration into the world economy. This might be an underlying cause of Block’s (2001) assertion that being closed to trade hurt African countries more than non-African countries. In an influential paper Gallup et al. (1999, p. 1) points out that countries in the tropics are nearly all poor and landlocked are much poorer than coastal economies. Africa is particularly disadvantaged as it has 90 per cent of its countries in the tropics and has the most landlocked economies of any continent.
