By applying the smile curve concept to regional value added growth rather than to levels, the paper claims that local value-added growth increases when a region is specialised in scarce natural resources or scarce human skills within a GVC. Under these circumstances, in fact, the region can...

Transport costs are a crucial element of any spatial economic model. Surprisingly, good transport cost estimates at a detailed spatial level for the EU are not readily available. In this paper we address this issue by estimating a novel dataset of road freight transport costs for goods for the...