RIMISP Centro Latinoamericano para el Desarrollo Rural

We describe the patterns of economic growth and social progress in Colombian “functional territories”. Unlike political/administrative divisions that emerge at least partly for historical reasons unrelated to economic interactions, functional territories reflect the patterns of spatial agglomeration and economic interactions in a territory. Using a novel definition of functional territories, our analysis reveals significant fragmentation of economic interactions: close to 66% of municipalities (holding about 20% of the country’s population) have no significant links to neighboring areas. A set of comparatively more (but still only partially) integrated and more populous municipalities have stronger links between them. This “rural-urban” space holds just around 31% of total population. The rest of Colombians are in “urban” or “Metropolitan” highly-populated and more integrated clusters. We describe these territories along two dimensions: economic growth or “dynamism” and progress in social indicators or “inclusion”. To do so we propose a simple conceptual framework that organizes the diverse inputs that might help boost these outcomes. Larger and more urbanized agglomerations exhibit visible advantages in these inputs. Moreover, long-run institutional determinants best help differentiate territories. Consistent with this, larger and more urbanized agglomera-tions have better outcomes, especially when measuring economic activity. Also, more dynamic places tend to be the more inclusive ones.

The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly correlated with signicant within-country dierences in economic and political institutions, which are themselves highly persistent over the same period. We propose a tentative political economy theory of why the spatial distribution of institutions and economic outcomes has been so persistent over time.

This paper uses use data on the most recent population Censuses to analyse internal migration flows of rural youth in Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, focusing on two questions. First, are rural youth more likely to migrate than the adult population? Second, what are the characteristics of the main poles of expulsion and attraction of young migrants?

This paper analyzes the relationship between local poverty and food manufacturing growth in Chile and Mexico using propensity score matching, differences in differences and spatial econometrics methods. We focus on food manufacturing as a sector with a number of characteristics that make it potentially pro-poor, and whose incentives for spatial distribution may either strengthen or dampen its poverty reduction potential. The overall results indicate growth in food manufacturing employment contributes to local poverty reduction. There is an old version of the document: https://goo.gl/7eucF3

The delimitation of functional spatial units or functional territories is an important topic in regional science and economic geography since the empirical verification of many causal relationships is affected by the size and shape of these areas. Most of the literature on the delimitation of these functional territories is based on developed countries, usually using contemporary and updated information of commuting flows. Conversely, in developing countries the technical contributions have been incipient.