This paper sets up a two country monopolistic competition model with intra-industry trade to study the effects of an exogenous differential in wage and social policies on the location of industry. Two model scenarios are considered. In the traditional one with physical capital, such a differential induces a relocation effect which increases with the level of trade integration. The ‘new economic...

Literature from several phases of the career of Masahisa Fujita is surveyed chronologically, with a view toward future contributions in these areas. First we address the economic structure of the interior of a city with mobile consumers, adding production. Next we provide a critical discussion of the New Economic Geography, in particular distinguishing between recent approaches employing two re...

This paper argues that a geographical perspectie is fundamental to understanding comparative economic development in the context of globalization. Central to this view is the role of agglomeration in productivity performance; size and location matter. The tools of the new economic geography are used to illuminate important epidsodes when the relative position of major eeconmies radically change...

We present a model that explains how a cluster moves through a life cycle and why this movement differs from the industry life cycle. The model is based on three key processes: the changing heterogeneity in the cluster describes the movement of the cluster through the life cycle; the geographical absorptive capacity enables clustered companies to take advantage of a larger diversity of knowledg...

Public Infrastructure as a Determinant of Intertemporal and Interregional Productive Performance in China This paper focuses on the question whether public infrastructure capital matters for labor productivity in China, both over time and across regions. It finds that public infrastructure is a significant determinant of variations in labor productivity across provinces, but the contribution of...

Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off between national growth and regional dispersion in the EU’s Cohesion countries, notably in Spain and Ire...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it estimates the impact of related and unrelated variety of European regions’ knowledge structure on their patenting activity. Second, it looks at the role of technological relatedness and extra-local knowledge acquisitions for local innovative activity. Specifically, it assesses how external technological relatedness affects regional innovation perfor...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the variables to remove the spatial correlation, and application of standard GMM estimators for dynamic pane...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what extent transport infrastructure endowment – proxied by regional motorways – has contributed to regional g...