Despite the process of economic integration, recently we have been witnessing divergence of regions in their economic performance and development, resulting in considerable differences income, employment and welfare. This is neither socially nor politically desirable. Markets, like the labour...

The city of Brussels has a unique position in Europe. It is not only the capital city of the European Union, it also the capital of federal state of Belgium, of its two different language communities and of the government of the Brussels region. Independent of this, the city itself is composed...

The last one and a half centuries have witnessed dramatic changes in the world economy. The service (tertiary) sector, which at the beginning of the 20th century was of little importance relative to agriculture and manufacturing, has become the dominant sector today, accounting for 80% and more...

Transport sector has a long tradition of using the principles of practical cost benefit analysis (CBA) in project appraisal that analyses the primary impacts of transport investments. The standard transport project assessment is necessary but not sufficient for the estimation of the wider...

We develop an interregional computable general equilibrium model to help assess the ex ante impact of transportation infrastructure policies in Egypt. The model is integrated with a GIS network. We illustrate the analytical capabilities of the model by looking at the domestic integration of the...

Using Jones (2014) generalized human capital accounting, we extend the urban accounting model of Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg (2013) to account for the geographic distribution of skills across US metropolitan areas. The methodology allows the productivity of high-skill workers to depend on location...

This paper analyses the different factors that explain the pattern of economic growth in Spain along the last two decades, where has stood out the rapid growth of per capita income, capital accumulation and creation of employment. However, the most important structural phenomenon of the strong...

Many cities in developing countries suffer from bad health and environmental conditions due to urbanization. The paper shows that increasing urban manufacturing congestion costs do not necessarily imply a reduction of a city's health as well as of environmental quality as one could expect...

We study the optimal and equilibrium size of cities in a monocentric city model with environmental pollution. Pollution is related to city size through the effect of population on production, commuting, and housing consumption. If pollution is local, we find that equilibrium cities are too...

The aim of this paper is to determine a theoretical linkage between tax decentralisation and regional growth. For this purpose a two fiscal tiers growth model is specified. First, working on Zou (1996) analytical framework, which account for the potential effects of intergovernmental policies on...