This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural-urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural-urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an economy...

This paper examines the relationship between openness and within-country regional inequality across 28 countries over the period 1975-2005. In particular, it tests a) whether increases in trade lead to rising inequalities, b) whether these inequalities recede in time, and c) whether increases in...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

We present a joint study of the US structural transformation (the decline of agriculture as the dominating sector) and regional convergence (of Southern to Northern average wages). We find that empirically most of the regional convergence is attributable to the structural transformation: the...

We investigate the sources of productivity convergence using panel data for the Spanish regions. As a framwork, we develop a simple descriptive growth model which allows for factor accumulation, technological diffusion and rate effects from human capital and which includes fixed regional effects...

A key driver of foreign investment in land, food security is a challenge mankind has been confronted with in various times and places. Wherever human societies have developed, growing needs have led to increasing arable land, and when land has been limited by nature or wars, food shortages...