Many regions on the EU Eastern borders have developed favourably after the opening up of the border and the implementation of association agreements with the CEECs. This was often seen as a positive sign for the further perspectives of these regions after EU enlargement. In this paper we take a...

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main...

This paper analyses in the framework of a 2-region economic geography model the impact of transfers on agglomeration of economic activity. Two main results can be derived: First, subsidies to the activity of firms are more efficient to avoid agglomeration than subsidies to consumers (social...

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy's exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries,...

Japan's markets for money, capital and foreign exchange are among the biggest worldwide. For many years, Tokyo's role as the leading financial center in Asia has been unchallenged. However, recently, other places in the region such as Singapore and Hong Kong have invested heavily to strengthen...

Modern (endogenous) growth theory tells us that knowledge spillovers are crucial for the growth of high-income economies. Against this background the paper provides a survey of theoretical and empirical findings highlighting the question of how geographically limited knowledge diffusion can help...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing...

It is uncertain whether the fundamental 'home market effect' (HME) generalizes from a two-country model to a more realistic setting with multiple countries. We present a three-country version of the seminal model by Krugman (1980) and analyse under which circumstances the HME is present once...

This paper focuses on tax competition and international migration in R&D sectors as agglomeration forces and trade restrictions are present. Economic integration forces industrialized countries to adapt their tax rates in order to keep their industrial status quo. Unlike the often discussed...

While a market economy seeks equilibrium, a knowledge-based economy may upset this tendency towards stabilization by adding the feedback of globalization. The interaction among the three subdynamics of economic exchange, technological innovation, and institutional control can be captured with a...