Regional economics: a new economic geography perspective

This journal has been launched in 1972 under the title Regional and Urban Economics, which is almost the name of the JEL-classification entry R. The first point we wish to make is that, by the time this journal was launched, urban economics was already a well-established field drawing on new concepts and tools. By contrast, the scientific status of regional economics was less clear in that regional concepts, models and techniques were too often a mere extension of those used at the national level, with an additional index identifying the different regions (see, e.g., interregional input-output matrices or the Harrod-Domar model of regional growth). The Samuelsonian emphasis put on trade theory also acted as an impediment to the further development of regional economics, the trade of goods being viewed as a substitute to the mobility of factors. Today, thanks to the surge of new economic geography (in short, NEG), it is time to re-think regional economics. This is what we wish to do in this note. It is worth stressing from the outset that, in order to talk even halfway sensibly about regional economics, it is necessary to tackle the following two questions: (i) what do we