Teaching economic geography is not a matter of replicating textbook models. It requires engagement with the ever-changing global economy, which often puts the lie to existing theory. It demands that the teacher break down the economy into its major parts, in a way that students can grasp. This does not mean abandoning theory; on the contrary, it means getting beyond static exchange models to gr...

The benchmark of this paper is the Fujita and Thisse (2002) core-periphery model, which adds a R&D sector with skilled labor to create new varieties for the modern sector. The number of R&D firms increases not only with the number of existing patents and knowledge spillovers but also with the number of skilled workers who can migrate and choose the region offering the better lifetime salary. Th...

This paper presents an overview of recent development in the new economic geography (NEG), and discusses possible directions of its future development. Since there already exist several surveys on this topic, we focus on the selected features of the NEG which are important yet have attracted insufficient attention, and also on the recent refinements and extensions of the framework. The Institut...

a r t i c l e i n f o We investigate the role of competitive transport markets in shaping the location of economic activity and the pattern of trade. In our model, carriers supply transport services for shipping manufactured goods, and freight rates are set to clear transport markets. Each carrier must commit to the maximum capacity for a round-trip and thus faces a logistics problem as there a...

To the metaphors of software engineering and software physics can be added that of software geography. We examine the physical and economic aspects of the Software Glacier (once an innocent bubbling brook, now a vast frozen mass of applications imperceptibly shaping both the Hardware Shelf below and User City above), Quantum Planet (colonization of which could be fruitful if and when it becomes...

This paper studies global stability of spatial configurations in a dynamic two-region model with quadratic adjustment costs where rational migrants make migration decisions so as to maximize their discounted future utilities. A global analysis is conducted to show that, except for knife–edge cases with symmetric regions, there exists a unique spatial configuration that is absorbing and globally...

Most of the literature argues that competitive analysis has nothing interesting to say about location. This paper argues, to the contrary, that a competitive model can have something interesting to say about location, provided that locations are not identical and transportation costs are not zero. To do this, it constructs a competitive intertemporal general equilibrium model and applies it to ...

comprehensive set of countries with populations of 1 million or more in 1994. In total, our data include 5.507 billion people, of an estimated global population in 1994 of 5.601 billion, or 98.3 percent of the total world population. The main countries missing from the sample, because of unavailability of data, are: Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cuba, Iraq, Lebanon, and ...

Only a few research papers have analysed the spatial distribution of economic activity in Ireland. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that comprehensive data on the location of economic activity by sector across all sectors has not been available at the highly disaggregated spatial level. This paper firstly establishes the geographic distribution of employment at the 2 d...

The field of New Economic Geography (NEG) aims at explaining agglomeration based on increasing returns, monopolistic competition and international factor mobility. Deviating from existing approaches, this paper constructs a theoretical model based on capital market frictions. Firms compete monopolistically, but are lead by managers subject to moral hazard. Incentivizing managers is cheaper in r...