Industry location and wages: The role of market size and accessibility in trading networks

We investigate the geographical distribution of economic activity and wages in a general equilibrium model with many asymmetric regions and costly trade. As shown by extensive simulations on random networks, local market size better explains a region’s industry share, whereas accessibility better explains a region’s wage. The correlation between equilibrium wages and industry shares is low, thus suggesting that the two variables operate largely independently. The model replicates well the spatial distribution of industry using Spanish data, yet overpredict changes in that distribution due to changes in 'generalized transport costs'. The latter had only small impacts on changes in the geographical distribution of economic activity in Spain from 1980 to 2007.