The connections between the development of creative industries and the growth of cities was noted by several sources in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but explanations relating to the nature of the link have thus far proven to be insufficient. The two dominant “scripts” were those of “creative clusters” and “creative/cities/creative class” theories, but both have significant limi...

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including O notice, is given to the source. There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in acc...

The idea that economic institutions are determinants of long-run economic performance is largely associated with the work of Douglass North and several other economists in the post-War period. Although the importance of institutions has been recognized by many authors since at least Adam Smith (1776), much of post-War economics research ignored the importance of institutions for economic growth...

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organisations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilisations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic in...

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 theory, the estimation results show that a spatial wage structure exists for the EU regions. By going back ...

We review historical patterns of economic geography for the United States from the colonial period to the present day. The analysis is framed in terms of two geographic scales: regions and cities. The compelling reason for studying geographic area of two different scales is that models that explain location of economic activities at one scale may not apply to other scales. We consider the proce...

BRAKMAN S. and GARRETSEN H. (2003) Rethinking the ‘new’ geographical economics, Reg. Studies 37, 637–648. Mainstream economics and geography have largely developed separately. With some notable exceptions, this had led to a situation in which economists and geographers analyse similar issues, but do so in a very different framework and without taking much notice of each other’s work. The main t...