We study the role of: (i) initial differences in shares of immobile workers between countries which stand for the agglomeration forces, and (ii) positive trade costs in the traditional sector which are related to the dispersion forces, in shaping the spatial pattern of the developed and...

This paper tests directly a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan during different time periods. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold...

Based on a new economic geography (NEG) model by Puga (1999), we use the equilibrium wage equation to estimate two key structural model parameters for the NUTS II EU regions. These estimations enable us to come up with an empirically grounded free-ness of trade parameter. In line with NEG...

This article introduces a social planner version of a model central to the New Economic Geography for explicitly answering whether the symmetric equilibrium outcome of the decentralized market economy is socially desirable. We find that savings incentives are too weak, resulting in an...

The paper quantifies the impact of agglomeration economies on the clustering of German firms. Therefore, I use the 2006 Innobarometer survey, which focuses on cluster characteristics and activities of German firms, to empirically identify agglomeration economies derived from the New Economic...

In the last ten years the space issue, i.e. the study of the role played by space in economic phenomena, has attracted a lot of interest from many economic fields. The combination of increasing returns, market imperfections, and trade costs creates forces that, together with factor endowments,...

The paper studies the Krugman's CP model in the weakly explored case of asymmetric regions in two settings: international trade and agglomeration processes. First setting implies that the industrial labor is immobile, while second one consider mobile industrial labor and long-run equilibria....

In the last ten years the space issue, i.e. the study of the role played by space in economic phenomena, has attracted a lot of interest from many economic fields. Both the suitability of spatial economics to address questions posed by globalization, and improves in modeling techniques are at...