Introduction to Special Section:

Abstract

The papers of this Special Section were presented at the conference DEGIT XVI in St Petersburg, Russia, held on September 8–9, 2011. They were selected from more than 100 submitted conference papers and subjected to the normal refereeing process. Notwithstanding rather different individual perspectives, all included papers deal with various implications of multi-sector models of growth and development. Theoretical and empirical work on the interactions between long-run growth and the sectorial structure of an economy appears to gain momentum, not least in development economics. In our reading, this Special Section represents a cross-section of ongoing research efforts in what looks to become a vibrant research field of its own. Hence the authors hope that readers may find ideas and suggestions for their own work on multisector models of growth and development. The first paper by Volker Grossmann uses an endogenous growth model with a modern and a traditional sector to discuss the effects of productivity spillovers and non-homothetic demand functions on sectorial structural change and the sustainability of long-run growth in the presence of urban congestion effects. The main results of the model are that sectorial productivity spillovers may diminish the sustainable rate of long-run growth and that congestion effects may result in a negative scale effect on per capita income. The paper by Fabio Cerina and Francesco Mureddu looks at the relation between structural change and long-run growth from the perspective of a New Economic Geography model, which emphasizes the role of trade costs in explaining the pattern of development. The innovative features of their model are the possibility of a multiple equilibria regime at intermediate levels of trade cost and the way growth is affected by trade costs and agglomeration through non-homothetic demand equations. The classical core–periphery model of the New Economic Geography literature is the starting point of the paper by Alexander Sidorov and Evgeny Zhelobodko. They extend the classical model for the case where the initial distribution of the agricultural population is asymmetric and discuss, for this case, the existence and uniqueness of the short run-equilibrium and the number and stability of long-run equilibria, which both have been controversially assessed in the previous literature. The main result of