The aim of this paper is to study the location decisions of upstream and downstream industries when transport costs in each sector are analysed separately. By using a new economic geography model built on Venables (1996), it will be shown that the effects of cost reductions in transporting final...

We analyze how unionized wage setting affects the location of firms. We find that the degree of 'centralization' (at firm or sectoral level) and 'regionalization' (at regional or supra-regional level) is crucial. We show that wage setting at the firm level is the best policy to attract firms...

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically solvable ?new economic geography? model with two trade integrating regions. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is ?bubbleshaped?, i.e. it...

To examine the effects of heterogeneous labor mobility on the distribution of industries and analyze the subsidy policy for attracting firms, this paper develops an analytically solvable new economic geography model, which incorporates heterogeneous locational preferences and an intra-industry...

Globalization and European integration are substantially changing the interregional division of labor in Europe and the industrial specialization of European regions, thereby potentially affecting the extent of disparities between countries and regions. This paper reviews several theoretical...

Does European economic integration create more inequality between domestic regions, or is the opposite true? We show that a general answer to this question does not exist, and that the outcome depends on the liberalisation scenario. In order to examine the impact of European and international...

We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global efficiency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect: the range of available varieties varies depends on the...