This paper analyses the effect of international borders and of trade agreements at international borders on subnational (i.e. regional) growth. We construct an extensive panel dataset covering 1,350 regions in 86 countries worldwide between 1950 and 2017. Our results show that international...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

The abolition of the artificial impediments of cross-border interaction has produced a new EU regional socioeconomic map, releasing dynamics that have influenced significantly the EU socioeconomic space. Especially at the borderlands, a new mix of opportunities and threats has come forth,...

Redding and Sturm (2008) use the German division as a natural experiment to study the importance of market access for regional development. They show empirically that cities close to the East-West German border experienced a significant decline in population growth due to division. I argue that...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods, and data. We survey a range of modeling traditions, and some formal approaches to the hard problem of regional economics; namely, the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

Brazil is currently immersed in the project of building a new common market, known as MERCOSUR, with its neighbors Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. It has largely been assumed that this project will produce economic growth and therefore be beneficial for the environment. However, this assumption...

In this paper, we develop a specific method to approach the competitive capabilities of regions for which there are not commercial and specialization indicators available. This method bases on the construction of composite indicators, using multivariate statistical methods, and was applied to...

This paper provides new insights in the link between distance and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in OECD countries. We find that the impact of distance on flows and stocks of FDI, controlling for exports, is negative and strongly significant, in line with gravity models, whereas in a standard...