We review the theoretical links between growth and agglomeration. Growth, in the form of innovation, can be at the origin of catastrophic spatial agglomeration in a cumulative process la Myrdal. One of the surprising features of the Krugman [Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991) 483499] model,...

This chapter examines empirical strategies that have been or could be used to evaluate the importance of agglomeration and trade models. This theoretical approach, widely known as New Economic Geography (NEG), emphasizes the interaction between transport costs and firm-level scale economies as a...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first one, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution...

This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the effect of factor mobility and the ensuing tax competition on the capacity of governments to raise revenue and redistribute income. It focuses on three issues: the relevance and limitations of the race to the bottom result, the benefits and...

Cities can be thought of as the absence of physical space between people and firms. As such, they exist to eliminate transportation costs for goods, people and ideas and transportation technologies dictate urban form. In the 21st century, the dominant form of city living is based on the...

Fiscal decentralization is on the rise worldwide while barriers to factor and population mobility are declining. Greater decentralized government activity is therefore taking place in an economic environment characterized by increased competition for mobile resources, and government policy...

This chapter considers the role of economic and political institutions in the formation of local public policies. The chapter has three objectives. First, to synthesize the dominant models of local policy formation with mobile households, with particular emphasis on the objectives that are...

We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf's law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/ S )...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: (i)...

What is the effect of an increase in the overall level of human capital on the economy of a city? Although much is known about the private return to education, much less is known about the more important question of what happens to productivity, wages and land prices when the aggregate stock of...