Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1998 by World BankReview by: Geoffrey McNicollPopulation and Development Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), p. 611Published by: Population CouncilStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/172364 .

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BOOK REvIEws PDR 25(3) 611

WORLD BANK Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1998 Washington, DC: World Bank, 1999. v + 411 p. $40.00. The annual World Bank development conferences, described by the acronym ABCDE, bring together Bank staff and development experts from academia-in- cluding noneconomists. They combine general addresses on current issues in de- velopment and international economic policy with papers and discussion on sev- eral selected themes. The report on ABCDE 1998, the tenth in the series, is edited by Boris Pleskovic and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Two of the 1998 themes are of demographic interest: 'Is geography destiny?" and "Ethnic conflicts." On the first of these, two papers present an intriguing en- gagement. Geographic determinism, acting through factors such as transport costs, disease burden, and climatic constraints on agriculture, is defended by John Luke Gallup, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Andrew D. Mellinger. Paul Krugman presents the contrasting perspective of the "new economic geography," emphasizing historical contingency, self-reinforcing processes, and possibilities for multiple equilibria- where an urban center or locational system can be sustained despite its initial geo- graphic advantages having long since vanished. Gallup et al. note that the UN's projections show the world's future population growth concentrated in regions that are "least coastal, most tropical, and most distant from the core economies." They write: "A certain calm has descended over [the population] policy area on the questionable grounds that population growth does not matter for per capita income growth. We have seen the half-truth of this assessment: it may be true for coastal countries engaged in the international division of labor, but it is most likely untrue for the geographically distressed regions where population increases will be most dramatic." Krugman's more open-ended view: "The current pattern of world economic geography shows a strong association between per capita income and essentially Western European conditions-temperate climate, absence of ma- laria, much of the population close to the coast or navigable rivers, or both. But this pattern may mainly reflect the catalytic role of these factors in the past and need not imply that an inland country (which now has access to good roads and cheap air transport) with a hot climate (but now has access to modern cooling technology) and environmental conditions that once made it malarial (but not now thanks to mosquito eradication programs) cannot break free of its low-level trap and move to a better equilibrium."'

The discussion on ethnic conflict is contained in papers by Donald L. Horowitz, who sets out no fewer than ten competing theoretical explanations of such con- flict and speculates on the possibility of a synthesis, and Paul Collier, who presents a statistical study of the links among ethnic diversity, political rights, economic performance, and civil war.-G.McN.

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