Capital liberalization, industrial agglomeration and wage inequality

This paper sets up a new economic geography model with diminishing marginal returns and examines the effect of capital liberalization on industrial agglomeration and wage inequality. The simulation results indicate that for the country with strict capital controls, capital liberalization can help reduce wage difference between countries in both nominal and real terms. It is also shown that when both comparative advantage and agglomeration are in effect, low trading costs does not necessarily cause the catastrophic agglomeration in the country with the larger market as most other NEG models predict.