World development report 2009 : Reshaping Economic Geography : Part two

The most celebrated example in economics is perhaps the simplest. On the fi rst page of The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith wrote of the benefi ts of dividing labor to make pins. A single unskilled worker without the benefi t of machines might make fewer than 20 pins in a day. But in a pin factory that Smith visited, 10 workers, who divided among themselves the 18 operations involved in making a pin, were producing 48,000 pins a day. Rather than struggling to produce just a few pins a day, each worker was turning out almost 5,000. Later in Smith’s classic work are two important qualifi ers : the gains from dividing labor are limited by market size, and not all activities exhibit increasing returns to scale.

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