A prominent feature of economic geography in America is the positive correlation amongst local incomes, housing costs and city population. This paper embeds a black box agglomeration economy within a more neoclassical general equilibrium model of local wages, rents and population to assess the...

Urbanization economies - the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities - are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast majorities...

The existence of compensating differentials in Russian labor and housing markets is examined using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) augmented by city and regional-specific characteristics from other sources. While Russia is undergoing transition to a market economy, we...

A prominent feature of economic geography in America is the positive correlation amongst local incomes, housing costs and city population. This paper embeds a “black box” agglomeration economy within a more neoclassical general equilibrium model of local wages, rents and population to assess...

The existence of compensating differentials in Russian labor and housing markets is examined using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) augmented by city and regional-specific characteristics from other sources. While Russia is undergoing transition to a market economy, we...

Urbanization economies – the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities – are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast...

We propose the so-called domestic "embodied unit labor costs" (EULC) at the country-sector level as a new cost-related basis for measures of international competitiveness. EULC take into account that a sector's labor costs constitute only a small share of its total cost which to a large extent...

This paper is an annual publication issued by the Microeconomic Analysis service of the National Bank of Belgium. The Flemish maritime ports (Antwerp, Ghent, Ostend, Zeebrugge), the Autonomous Port of Liège and the port of Brussels play a major role in their respective regional economies and in...

This study assesses the economic importance of air transport and airport activities in Belgium in terms of value added, employment and investment over the 2013-2015 period. The sector considered embraces not only the activities directly connected with air transport, but also all those that take...

This Working Paper analyses the economic importance of the Belgian ports based largely on the annual accounts data for the year 2016. As the years prior to 2016 have been described in earlier papers in the same series, we mainly focus on the figures for 2016 and developments between 2015 and...