Conclusion
The best way to summarise Tony's research contributions to economics is to build on his own assessment of how research at the juncture of trade, geography and development has evolved in the last few decades.
In an unpublished paper written to celebrate the 30th birthday of the CEPR (see Venables 2013), he looked back to take stock of what had been achieved by the International Trade Programme he had also co-directed for a decade:In the 30 years since the CEPR was launched the word “globalisation” has come in and out of fashion; the ratio of world trade to GDP has doubled, foreign direct investment has grown even faster, communications technology has been transformed and trade liberalization—unilateral, regional and multilateral— have all made progress (Venables 2013: 9).
Continuing:
Trade matters for two reasons. One—that of classical international econom- ics—is that it enables a country to get its consumption more cheaply; exports in line with comparative advantage fund the import of goods with comparative disadvantage. The other is that trade can be a catalyst for other changes, going far beyond switching suppliers of some goods. Trade brings larger markets, interaction with a wider group of people and access to new technologies. These can change performance across the wider economy and may have implications many times greater than comparative advantage alone. These “wider” effects of trade have been at the forefront of much trade research in the last 30 years; they have brought an intellectual excitement to the field, have deepened understanding of important phenomena, and have made issues of trade (and spatial economics more generally) of relevance to a broader range of policy makers... Further, there are three areas in which research on these wider effects of trade has made progress. They are as follows: market integration—firms, competition and scale; geography and the location of economic activity; trade and development.
In each of these areas there has been interaction between researchers and policy makers. This is two-way; research insights have shaped policy, and policy makers have shaped the worldview and the priorities of researchers (ibid.: 1).Nevertheless:
Research questions—on the evolution of firms, the quantification of gains and the ways in which to lever the most from export activities—remain. However, the last 30 years of research has seen unprecedented innovation, theoretical and empirical and has established the centrality of trade—within and between countries—to overall economic performance. Economies work better if spatial barriers to interaction are reduced (ibid.: 9—10).
Tony has been a crucial contributor to this wave of ‘unprecedented innovation'. His legacy is in his research, but also in his students and in particular the younger scholars he has interacted with especially at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) during his time at LSE. Among others, these scholars include Mary Amiti, Gilles Duranton, Simona Iammarino, Niko Matouschek, Henry Overman, Diego Puga, Steve Redding, Francisco Requena-Silvente, Daniel Sturm, Karen Helene Ultveit-Moe and Marina Wes. I had Tony as my MSc supervisor at LSE in 1992-1993. That was when Paul Krugman could also often be found at the School, NEG was taking off and, in terms of world research on “geography and trade”, several researchers across Europe were leading the pack. My own research trajectory owes a lot to those glory days.