This paper investigates the spatial concentration of Chinese manufacturing using data collected in both the second and third national industrial censuses. It is found that many of China’s manufacturing industries were highly geographically concentrated in several coastal regions in 1995. A historical comparison of the concentration levels between 1980, 1985 and 1995 suggests that manufacturing ...

Empirical analyses show that the employment effects of start-ups are highest in agglomerations, whereas moderately congested areas exhibit only modest effects, and weak or even no significant effects could be found in rural regions. This paper will set out to show that these discrepancies arise from specific characteristics of urban areas. The magnitude of the employment effects of entry in agg...

The Journal of Economic Literature codes classification system (JEL) published by the American Association (AEA) is de facto standard for research literature in economics. JEL used to classify articles, dissertations, books, book reviews, and working papers EconLit, a database maintained AEA. Over time, it has evolved extended with over 850 subclasses. This paper reviews history development sys...

The Impact of Local Decentralization on Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Counties We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose governments per...

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 spatial concentration (agglomeration) on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat’s Law and Zipf’s Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an equilibrium situation. Zipf’s law is formalized in a static form, while its associated dynamic process ...

There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing returns model of economic geography featuring ‘home market effects’ with that o...

Geography vs. Institutions at the Village Level There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on crosscountry regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot easily be controlled for. The innovation of Acemoglu, J...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and that this indirect effect on incumbent employment leads to more jobs than what is created by the new...

A mong the theories explaining the relationship between creativity criteria in cities and economic growth, “Human Capital Theory” by Glaeser and “Creative Class theory” by Florida can be mentioned. Accordingly, present paper aimed at analysis of the creativity effect on regional economic growth and is presented in two theoretical and experimental parts. Considering the results of the curre...