The standard two-country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more-than-proportional relationship between a country's share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good, a result known as the “home market effect”. We first...

We investigate how international trade and trade policy possibly affect the regional distribution of economic activities within a country involved in a process of economic integration. Our analysis reveals that the impact of decreasing international trade costs on the spatial distribution of...

What determines the spatial distribution of economic activity? And why is economic activity sometimes "lumpy", distributed in a core-periphery pattern in some countries? This paper uses new sub regional data on the spatial distribution of economic activity for a large cross section of countries,...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution of...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

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...

We consider an economic geography model in which all firms and workers are mobile, but the agglomeration of firms and workers within a region generates urban costs. We show that industries with high transport costs tend to be more agglomerated than industries with low transport costs. This is to...

Questo lavoro è la versione preliminare del capitolo dedicato alla “New Economic Geography” (NEG) ed alle sue implicazioni per lo sviluppo locale del testo “Manuale di sviluppo locale” (a cura di G. Seravalli), attualmente in corso di stesura. Il lavoro studia innanzitutto il problema...

There is a large consensus among international institutions and national governments to favor urban-containment policies - the compact city - as a way to reduce the ecological footprint of cities. This approach overlooks the following basic trade-off : the concentration of activities decreases...

This paper proposes an empirical investigation of a few outcomes of economic geography models. First, we intend to assess the role of the home market effect and of the level of transport costs on the outgoing trade flows. For this purpose we refer to a regional context looking at a chosen sample...