This article introduces a social planner version of a model central to the New Economic Geography for explicitly answering whether the symmetric equilibrium outcome of the decentralized market economy is socially desirable. We find that savings incentives are too weak, resulting in an...

Rural areas still play a major role within the EU, as Europe is still a fairly rural continent. Moreover, EU rural areas are going through greater challenges and major transformations. After the Eastern enlargements of the EU (in 2004 and 2007), they are getting more and more heterogeneous, in...

Reducing disparities among regions within European countries is the aim of European and national structural policies. In particular, a European grant contributes to the German governmental program for equalizing regional unemployment. The goal is to bring it down to the national average by...

The paper asks whether subsidies aiming to redistribute economic activity across regions can be justified with the welfare argument. Moreover, different tax systems are compared with respect to the size of the subsidy needed for achieving a certain spatial distribution of economic activity, and...