This paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims. (i) To describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level. (ii) To present...

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)...

This chapter begins with the dimensions of the poverty problem in developing countries, and then deals with conceptual and measurement issues. It next discusses the nature, characteristics and correlates of rural and urban poverty. It looks into the issue of gender and poverty, then turns to the...

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) and...

This chapter discusses theoretical and applied research in urban economics on decentralized cities, i.e., cities in which employment is not restricted to the central business district. The first section discusses informally the incentives that firms face to suburbanize. The next section...

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...

This chapter reviews the literature on the boundary between urban economics and local public finance, defined as research that considers both a housing market and the market for local public services. The first part of the chapter considers positive theories. This part presents the consensus...

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...