Resource information
Policy makers in developing countries,
including India, are increasingly sensitive to the links
between spatial transformation and economic development.
However, the empirical knowledge available on those links is
most often insufficient to guide policy decisions. There is
no shortage of case studies on urban agglomerations of
different sorts, or of benchmarking exercises for states and
districts, but more systematic evidence is scarce. To help
address this gap, this paper combines insights from poverty
analysis and urban economics, and develops a methodology to
assess spatial performance with a high degree of
granularity. This methodology is applied to India, where
individual household survey records are mapped to “places”
(both rural and urban) below the district level. The
analysis disentangles the contributions household
characteristics and locations make to labor earnings,
proxied by nominal household expenditure per capita. The
paper shows that one-third of the variation in predicted
labor earnings is explained by the locations where
households reside and by the interaction between these
locations and household characteristics such as education.
In parallel, this methodology provides a workable metric to
describe spatial productivity patterns across India. The
paper shows that there is a gradation of spatial performance
across places, rather than a clear rural-urban divide. It
also finds that distance matters: places with higher
productivity are close to each other, but some spread their
prosperity over much broader areas than others. Using the
spatial distribution of this metric across India, the paper
further classifies places at below-district level into four
tiers: top locations, their catchment areas, average
locations, and bottom locations. The analysis finds that
some small cities are among the top locations, while some
large cities are not. It also finds that top locations and
their catchment areas include many high-performing rural
places, and are not necessarily more unequal than average
locations. Preliminary analysis reveals that these top
locations and their catchment areas display characteristics
that are generally believed to drive agglomeration economies
and contribute to faster productivity growth.
