Milisters,
Tahun ini pemenang hadiah nobel ternyata ekonom yang sangat memperhatikan
"ekonomi wilayah". Saya kebetulan sering membaca tulisannya, juga debat dengan
michael porter tentang cluster theory. Paul krugman percaya bahwa kota
mempunyai magnet yang besar, tetapi setiap daerah juga mempunyai ciri khas yang
bisa berkembang (teory centrifugal dan centripetal). Perdagangan berkembang
bukan hanya faktor endowment dan comparative advantage (David Ricardo) tetapi
ada faktor konsumen yang menghendaki variasi. Banyak sekali tulisan krugman ini
tentang economic geography yang bisa dikembangkan oleh para urban planner. Saya
bukan ekonom, mudah2an bung Nuzul Achyar bisa menjelaskan teori yang
dikembangkan oleh Krugman ini. Yang jelas bahwa ternyata ahli economic
geography bisa memperoleh hadiah nobel. Siapa tahu salah satu dari referensier
bisa juga memperoleh hadiah serupa
Salam
Aunur Rofiq
Honoring Paul Krugman
By Edward L. Glaeser
Edward L. Glaeser is an economist at Harvard.
Rarely, if ever, has an economics Nobel laureate been as widely known before
receiving the prize than Paul Krugman. His New York Times columns have been
read by millions; he has argued economic policy eloquently in a large number of
popular books. Yet these pursuits had little to do with the decision of the
Nobel committee. They gave this prize to honor a truly seminal figure in
economic trade and geography. Krugman’s fame as a public intellectual should
not lead anyone to think that they understand his contributions to economic
research just because they regularly read his columns.
The Nobel Prize citation highlights two distinct but connected contributions:
Krugman’s development of the “new trade theory” and his work on the “new
economic geography.” International trade has a long history in economics, and
for the bulk of the field’s history, patterns of trade have been explained by
factor endowments and comparative advantage. Why does England export wool and
Portugal export wine? The cold winters of Yorkshire produce really fluffy sheep
and the banks of the Douro produce splendid grapes. Yet comparative advantage
does little to explain much of modern international trade, especially not trade
within industries.
Krugman published two seminal papers in 1979 and 1980 that made sense of the
fact that Toyota sells cars in Germany and Mercedes-Benz sells cars in Japan.
Krugman started with a variant of Edward Chamberlain’s model of monopolistic
competition. In this model, every firm sells a slightly different good — an
Infiniti is not exactly the same thing as a BMW. There are fixed costs of
production, which means that producers get more efficient as they sell more.
Finally, consumers like variety, so that even if they live in the Land of the
Rising Sun, with its abundant well-crafted cars, they still occasionally want
something a little more Teutonic.
These ingredients came together and provided a framework than can match the
world’s trade patterns better than the 19th-century framework of David Ricardo,
or the mid-20th-century models of Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Paul
Samuelson. The fact that two out of three of those 20th-century giants are
themselves Swedes should remind us of how seriously the Swedes take their trade
theory, and what a big deal it is for them to admit Krugman to the pantheon.
Krugman’s trade models became the standard in the economics profession both
because they fit the world a bit better and because they were masterpieces of
mathematical modeling. His models’ combination of realism, elegance and
tractability meant that they could provide the underpinnings for thousands of
subsequent papers on trade, economic growth, political economy and especially
economic geography.
Krugman’s 1991 Journal of Political Economy paper, “Increasing Returns and
Economic Geography,” is the first article that provides a clear, internally
consistent mathematically rigorous framework for thinking simultaneously about
trade and the location of people and firms across space. It is one of only two
models that I insist that Harvard’s Ph.D. students in urban economics be able
to regurgitate, equation by equation.
The model begins with the same basic elements as the new trade theory:
monopolistic competition, scale economics, love of variety. To these elements
Krugman adds free migration of workers across space and industries. Because
workers are able to move, real wages equalize across space. People in New York
City may be paid more, but they give some of that back in the form of higher
housing prices. The paper provides economists with a clear framework that can
make sense of where we all live. Firms and workers are pulled toward the same
location to reduce transportation costs of shipping goods. For example, the
garment industry located in New York City, in part because of the vast trade in
textiles that was already moving through the city and because of the large
number of customers already living in America’s largest city.
Of course, we don’t all live in the same city. A good model of geography needs
both a centripetal and a centrifugal force. In Krugman’s model, populations are
pulled apart by the desire to be close to natural inputs, like land or coal
mines. Cyrus McCormick moved his reaper business from Virginia to Chicago to be
closer to his rural customers in the Midwest. Later models incorporated traffic
congestion and other forces that limit the growth of a single large urban area.
Krugman’s model proved to quite adaptable; it has received thousands of
citations.
In his public role, Paul Krugman is often a polarizing figure, loved by
millions but also intensely disliked by his political opponents. I still
chuckle over an old New Yorker cartoon with one plutocrat saying to another
that he gets some satisfaction from the fact that his vote will cancel out the
vote of Paul Krugman. Within the less divided world of the academy, Krugman’s
economic research has generated plenty of light, but far less heat. His papers
are universally acknowledged to be massive contributions that helped to create
two distinct fields. His Nobel Prize is extremely well deserved and not
unexpected. I, for one, had bet on him in Harvard’s Nobel Prize winner pool.
