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Reproducibility package for Understanding The Impact Of Multi-Nodal Urban Systems On Thailand's Urban Economies: Insights From A Dynamic Recursive Spatial General Equilibrium Model

2026
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Reference ID
RR_THA_2026_675
Author(s)
Putu Sanjiwacika Wibisana, Steven Louis Rubinyi
Collections
World Bank Policy Research Working Papers
Metadata
JSON
Created on
Jul 06, 2026
Last modified
Jul 09, 2026
Page views
17
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4
  • Project Description
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  • Overview
  • Reproducibility Package
  • Description
  • Scope and coverage
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  • Information on metadata
  • Overview

    Abstract

    Thailand's transition to high-income status is, at its core, an urban challenge. Bangkok generates nearly half of national GDP, yet its dominance is increasingly constrained by congestion, environmental stress, and diminishing returns to further concentration. Successive National Spatial Development Strategies have called for a more multi-nodal urban hierarchy, but the analytical basis for evaluating that ambition has remained thin. This paper builds and calibrates a Dynamic Recursive Spatial Quantitative General Equilibrium model for Thailand's urban system from 2025 to 2050, and uses it to evaluate three counterfactual policy portfolios that allocate the same aggregate productivity-investment envelope (roughly 2.3 percent of 2030 urban GDP) across Bangkok and the eleven designated secondary cities in different proportions: a Bangkok-leaning portfolio (80/20), a balanced portfolio (50/50), and a secondary-leaning portfolio (20/80). The Bangkok-leaning portfolio leads through 2045, but the secondary-leaning portfolio overtakes it between 2045 and 2050, delivering a 12.38 percent gain in national GDP per capita above the no-investment baseline against 11.62 percent for the Bangkok-leaning alternative. The balanced portfolio is dominated by both skewed alternatives at 2050, reflecting a threshold property of agglomeration economies. A two-dimensional envelope-by-split sweep shows that the relative ranking is genuinely contingent on the scale and horizon of the commitment: below a certain tipping point, the Bangkok-leaning portfolio dominates; above it, the secondary-leaning portfolio does. A modest, well-allocated spatial-investment programme is unlikely to be the engine of Thailand's high-income transition; sufficient scale of commitment is a precondition.

    Reproducibility Package

    Scripts
    Readme Get Reproducibility Package
    Link: https://reproducibility.worldbank.org/catalog/602/download/1789/README.pdf
    Reproducibility package for Understanding The Impact Of Multi-Nodal Urban Systems On Thailand's Urban Economies: Insights From A Dynamic Recursive Spatial General Equilibrium Model
    File name
    RR_THA_2026_675
    Zip package
    RR_THA_2026_675.zip
    Title
    Reproducibility package for Understanding The Impact Of Multi-Nodal Urban Systems On Thailand's Urban Economies: Insights From A Dynamic Recursive Spatial General Equilibrium Model
    Date
    2026-07
    Dependencies
    R dependencies are listed in the file renv.lock.
    Instructions
    See README in reproducibility package.
    Notes
    Computational reproducibility verified by Development Impact (DECDI) Analytics team, World Bank.
    Source code repository
    Repository name URI
    Reproducible Research Repository (World Bank) https://reproducibility.worldbank.org
    Software
    R
    Name
    R
    Version
    4.5.2

    Reproducibility

    Technology environment

    Paper exhibits were reproduced on a computer with the following specifications:
    • OS: Windows 11 Enterprise
    • Processor: INTEL(R) XEON(R) PLATINUM 8562Y+ (2.80 GHz) (2 processors)
    • Memory available: 32.0 GB

    Technology requirements

    Run time: ~ 75 minutes

    Reproduction instructions

    To reproduce the findings in this paper from raw data, a replicator must:

    1. Secure Access to Data: Access the datasets not included in the package. See the Datasets section for more details.
    2. Run the Package:
    • Open the R project THAAM26.Rproj, and restore the environment by running renv::restore() and following the prompts.
    • Open main.R and run the code.

    To reproduce the findings in this paper from processed data, a replicator must:

    1. Open the R project THAAM26.Rproj, and restore the environment by running renv::restore() and following the prompts.
    2. Run the script THAAM26_SQGE_Reproducibility_FINAL.

    Data

    Datasets
    GHS-UCDB R2024A – GHS Urban Centre Database 2025
    Name
    GHS-UCDB R2024A – GHS Urban Centre Database 2025
    Note
    Data accessed in January 2026. File locations: GHS_UCDB_GLOBE_R2024A_UC_Boundaries.shp and associated sidecar files.
    Access policy
    Data is publicly available and included in the reproducibility package.
    License
    Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
    License URL
    https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/GHSL/GHS_UCDB_GLOBE_R2024A/GHS_UCDB_GLOBE_R2024A/V1-0/copyright.txt
    Data URL
    https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/GHSL/GHS_UCDB_GLOBE_R2024A/GHS_UCDB_GLOBE_R2024A/V1-0/
    Citation
    European Commission, Joint Research Centre. 2024. "GHS-UCDB R2024A — GHS Urban Centre Database 2025" [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.2905/1a338be6-7eaf-480c-9664-3a8ade88cbcd. Accessed January 2026.
    Global Gridded GDP under Historical and Future Scenarios
    Name
    Global Gridded GDP under Historical and Future Scenarios
    Note
    Data accessed in January 2026. SSP2 and SSP3 yearly GDP rasters for 2025–2100 at five-year intervals (16 rasters per scenario). Downloaded as SSP2.7z and SSP3.7z (~7.2 GB each) from the Zenodo record. Only SSP2 and SSP3 scenarios are used; SSP1, SSP4, SSP5, historical files (2000–2020), and the 0.25-degree variant are not used. Values are in 2005 USD PPP; Stage 2 rescales to 2017 USD PPP using the World Bank ICP 2017 conversion factor (0.91525). File location after extraction: Data/Global (Wang & Sun, 2022)/SSP Projection/.
    Access policy
    Data is publicly available but not included in the reproducibility package due to file size constraints.
    License
    Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
    License URL
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    Data URL
    https://zenodo.org/records/7898409
    Citation
    Wang, T. and Sun, F. 2022. "Global gridded GDP under the historical and future scenarios" [dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7898409. Accessed January 2026.
    Projected 1 km-grid SSP Population Distributions, 2020–2100
    Name
    Projected 1 km-grid SSP Population Distributions, 2020–2100
    Note
    Data accessed in January 2026. SSP2 and SSP3 yearly population rasters for 2025–2100 at five-year intervals (16 rasters per scenario). Some rasters carry implausible extent metadata and an inherited N–S offset; Stage 1 detects this automatically and writes corrected rasters into a FIXED/ subfolder before extracting per-UC totals. File location: Data/Projected SSP Population (Wang 2022)/.
    Access policy
    Data is publicly available but not included in the reproducibility package due to file size constraints.
    License
    Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
    License URL
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    Data URL
    https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Projecting_1_km-grid_population_distributions_from_2020_to_2100_globally_under_shared_socioeconomic_pathways/19608594
    Citation
    Wang, X., Meng, X., and Long, Y. 2022. "Projecting 1 km-grid population distributions from 2020 to 2100 globally under shared socioeconomic pathways." Scientific Data, 9, 563. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19608594. Accessed January 2026.
    Data statement

    All data sources are publicly available but not included in the reproducibility package due to file size constraints.

    Description

    Output
    Understanding The Impact Of Multi-Nodal Urban Systems On Thailand's Urban Economies: Insights From A Dynamic Recursive Spatial General Equilibrium Model
    Type
    Working Paper
    Title
    Understanding The Impact Of Multi-Nodal Urban Systems On Thailand's Urban Economies: Insights From A Dynamic Recursive Spatial General Equilibrium Model
    Description
    Policy Research Working Papers (PRWP)
    Authors
    Author Affiliation Email
    Putu Sanjiwacika Wibisana World Bank pwibisana@worldbank.org
    Steven Louis Rubinyi World Bank srubinyi@worldbank.org
    Date of production

    2026-07-06

    Scope and coverage

    Geographic locations
    Location Code
    Thailand THA
    Keywords
    Spatial General Equilibrium Multi-Nodal Urban Development Primate Cities Secondary Cities Agglomeration Thailand Urban Economics
    Topics
    ID Topic Parent topic ID Vocabulary Vocabulary URI
    R11 Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes R1 Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)
    R12 Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity R1 Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)
    R13 General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies R1 Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)
    O18 Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis • Housing • Infrastructure O1 Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)
    O53 Asia including Middle East O5 Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)

    Disclaimer

    Disclaimer

    The materials in the reproducibility packages are distributed as they were prepared by the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this event do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank, the Executive Directors of the World Bank, or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the materials included in the reproducibility package.

    Access and rights

    License
    Name URI
    MIT License https://opensource.org/license/mit
    World Bank IGO Rider https://github.com/worldbank/metadata-editor/blob/main/WB-IGO-RIDER.md

    Contacts

    Contacts
    Name Affiliation Email
    Putu Sanjiwacika Wibisana World Bank pwibisana@worldbank.org
    Reproducibility WBG World Bank reproducibility@worldbank.org

    Information on metadata

    Producers
    Name Abbreviation Affiliation Role
    Reproducibility WBG DECDI World Bank - Development Impact Department Verification and preparation of metadata
    Date of Production

    2026-07-06

    Document version

    1

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