In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts...

This paper surveys the modern economics literature on the role of neighborhoods in influencing socioeconomic outcomes. Neighborhood effects have been analyzed in a range of theoretical and applied contexts and have proven to be of interest in understanding questions ranging from the asymptotic...

This chapter considers the role of economic and political institutions in the formation of local public policies. The chapter has three objectives. First, to synthesize the dominant models of local policy formation with mobile households, with particular emphasis on the objectives that are...

This chapter focuses on the geographic dimensions of knowledge spillovers. The starting point comes from the economics of innovation and technological change. This tradition focused on the innovation production function however it was aspatial or insensitive to issues involving location and...

This paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims. (i) To describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level. (ii) To present...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: (i)...

We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf's law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S) and...

This chapter examines empirical strategies that have been or could be used to evaluate the importance of agglomeration and trade models. This theoretical approach, widely known as "New Economic Geography" (NEG), emphasizes the interaction between transport costs and firm-level scale economies as...

Fiscal decentralization is on the rise worldwide while barriers to factor and population mobility are declining. Greater decentralized government activity is therefore taking place in an economic environment characterized by increased competition for mobile resources, and government policy...