As commercialisation and privatisation of railway systems reach the political agendas in a number of countries, including Australia, the separation of infrastructure from operating business dictates that track costs need to be shared on an equitable basis. There is also a world-wide trend...

Financial feasibility and financial return are two key issues that farmers andland owners consider when deciding between alternative land uses such as arablefarming, forestry and agroforestry. Moreover regional variations in yields,prices and government grants mean that the relative revenue and...

Recent studies of border effects have focused on the intra-country and inter-country comparison of trade flows. It is found that borders have a negative impact on the size of cross-border trade. In order to estimate border effects on a regional level one needs not only data on inter-country but...

This paper analyses in the framework of a 2-region economic geography model the impact of transfers on agglomeration of economic activity. Two main results can be derived: First, subsidies to the activity of firms are more efficient to avoid agglomeration than subsidies to consumers (social...

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main...

North American railways were crucial to the integration of national territories from the mid-1850s through the 1920s. In the US, Canada, and Mexico, their development supported population settlement, resource extraction, industrialization, and the expansion of markets to regional and national...

Faculty Advisor: David Skidmore, Professor Department of Politics and International Relations, College of Arts and Sciences Drake University. Student editorial board for the Spring 2006 issue include: Teresa Abbey, Brittany Buchholz, Brett Myrick and Jeff Scheiber.

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economicproblems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e.,simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms of...

The oft-observed inverse relationship between economic activity in the formal or informal sector and levels of fertility is attributed to the opportunity costs of reproduction. The economic and social policies that initiate and maintain the substantial flow of federal transfer payments to the...