Rapid industrialization in East Asia, particularly China, is raising questions about who will feed the region in the next century and how Asia will pay for its food imports. The paper addresses this question by first reviewing existing food sector projections and then taking an economy-wide...

This paper examines the impacts of key trade reforms likely to affect the APEC region over the next decade. It does so by taking an economy-wide perspective using projections to the year 2005, based on the global CGE model known as GTAP. The paper begins by showing that the empirical impact of...

This paper deals with the relationship between decentralisation, regional economic development, and income inequality within regions. Using multiplicative interaction models and regionally aggregated microeconomic data for more than 100,000 individuals in the European Union (EU), it addresses...

Despite substantial regional expenditures at both national and community level, European regional policies do not appear to deliver. The evidence suggests that neither efficiency gains nor reduced regional inequalities are attained. If there is any positive impact at all, then it is at the most...

We study the effects of a decrease in trade costs on the spatial distribution of industry in a multi-regional economy, when a rise in the regional population of workers generates higher urban costs. When the number of cities is unaffected by falling trade costs, small cities become smaller for...

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of US-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all US-born workers in general. Because US and foreign born workers belong to different skill...

We investigate the role of skill heterogeneity in explaining location patterns induced by pecuniary externalities (Krugman (1991)). In our setting, sellers with higher skills perform better in the marketplace, and their sales are larger. Selling to distant locations leads to lower sales because...

The objective of this Paper is to apply different welfare approaches to the canonical model developed by Krugman, with the aim of comparing the only two possible market outcomes, i.e. agglomeration and dispersion. More precisely, we use the potential Pareto improvement criteria, as well as the...

This Paper focuses on two distinct facets of globalization: the decrease in the trade costs of goods and the decline of communication costs between headquarters and production facilities within firms. When the unskilled have about the same wage in the two regions, the decrease of these costs...

Increasing returns in matching between skilled workers and firms create a local thick-market externality when labour markets are geographically segmented. This generates an agglomeration force that can offset the dispersion force due to local competition in a segmented product market. When this...