Education, Local Amenity and Spatial Agglomeration in a Small-Open Multi-Regional Economic Growth Model: Extending the Uzawa-Lucas Model to an Interregional Economy

This paper proposes a multi-regional growth model with endogenous human and physical capital in a perfectly competitive economy. Structurally it is an extension of the Uzawa-Lucas model to an interregional economy, even though this paper models behavior of households in an alternative way and introduce Arrow’s learning by doing and Zhang’s creative leisure (or learning through consuming) in modeling human capital accumulation. The small-open economy consists of multiple regions and each region has production, one education and one housing sector. The production side is the same as in the neoclassical growth theory. Households move freely among regions, making decisions on levels of choosing housing, education, good, consumption and saving. A region’s amenity which affects households’ decisions is endogenous, depending on the region’s output and population. The model describes a dynamic interdependence among wealth accumulation, human capital accumulation, time distribution (among leisure, work and education) and division of labor with endogenous wealth and income distribution among regions under perfect competition. This study also simulates the motion of the national economy and examines effects of changes in some parameters.