Regional economic integration through logistics, information network and connectivity improvement can increase the 'virtual size' of an economy as trade with neighboring countries increases. This leads to substantial benefits from scale, network, coordination and agglomeration economies. As is...

Transportation infrastructure is a way for governments to achieve development goals by connecting peripheral areas to urban centers. This is particularly important in a country like China where income is highly unequally distributed across space. Yet understanding the gains from transportation...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature by providing a quantitative measurement of the influence of regional trade integration on productivity. For this purpose we address the link between trade and productivity thanks to knowledge spillovers in a multi-country model. The...

Economic integration affects economic development through two main channels: growth and localization of the economic activities. The theories of endogenous growth and economic geography enable us to understand these mechanisms. We study in this paper their similarities and specificities before...

This paper presents an overview of recent development in the new economic geography (NEG), and discusses possible directions of its future development. Since there already exist several surveys on this topic, we focus on the selected features of the NEG which are important yet have attracted...

This paper uses a general equilibrium trade framework to estimate the contribution of transport infrastructure to regional development. I apply the analysis to India, a country with a notoriously weak and congested transportation infrastructure. I first analyze the development effects of a...

The role of population density for economic activity was neglected in most part of economic theory. This paper is a review and extension of the previous works of the author in this field. So far, densities did not become common economic variables in economic analysis, and two countries with...

Sustainable use of natural resources becomes an important issue today not only due to global warming and pollution issues but also because of critical pressure on the Earth's regeneration possibility. We cannot use classical microeconomic approach here for two reasons: a) impossibility to create...

Trade has been considered a condition for growth and development, a view that might have merits in explaining the rise of the Western world. I use a new data set from archival sources of eighteenth-century China to revisit this question. This analysis suggests previous studies of market...

The paper provides historical perspectives on spatial economic inequalities in Brazil making use of a database on Brazilian municipalities from 1872 to 2000. A suit of maps and graphs describe the geographic factors shaping the historical development of the Brazilian economy highlighting the...