We provide an analytical approach that facilitates understanding the bifurcation mechanism of a wide class of economic models involving spatial agglomeration of economic activities. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of the Turing (1952) approach that has been used to analyze the...

We investigate the impact of changes in international trade and domestic transport costs on the internal geography of a domestic economy linked to the rest of the World through a hub. We address that issue by developing two three regions model, namely a version of the Footlose Entrepreneur and a...

Governments set numerous norms to protect consumers. Two countries may achieve the same level of protection of their consumers through different specifications. The adaptation costs induced by these differences create barriers to trade. The principle of mutual recognition addresses the problem...

This paper presents a simple, analytically solvable Chamberlinian agglomeration model. As in the canonical core-periphery (CP) model, two agglomerative forces are at work. However, the present model exhibits a 'pitchfork bifurcation' rather than the 'tomahawk bifurcation' of the CP model.

This paper presents empirical tests of the hypothesis that firms cluster geographically due to Marshallian localization economies. The hypothesis implies that changes in employment in localized industries should be more closely related within the regions than across regions. We develop an...

We compare the impact of falling transport costs, borne by firms, and decreasing tariffs, borne by either firms or consumers, on the regional distribution of economic activities. Our main result shows that tariffs and tranport costs play symmetric roles in that a decrease in either of them...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

Applying a newly developed CGE-model, we present scenarios for the future economic geography of Europe. The model divides the world into ten regions, of which five are European, and there are 14 industries, of which 12 are imperfectly competitive. With a complete input-output structure, the...

In this paper, based on the cyclic scheduling formulation of Schilling and Pantelides [22], we propose a continuous time mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the cyclic scheduling of a mixed plant, i.e. a plant composed of batch and continuous tasks. The cycle duration is a...