Over a millennium Europe has become largely urban. While urban growth, absolute and as a percentage of a growing population, has been as dramatic as economic change, many elements of continuity tie the present to the past. This evolution with path dependence is highlighted if one looks at...

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...

In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts...

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...

In this chapter we discuss the data sources and methods available for studying the spatial distribution of economic activity in North America. We document facts about the specialization of states and regions, as well as locations differentiated by their degree of urbanization. We also report...

Do regions converge? This essay provides an overview of the key developments in the study of regional convergence, discussing the methodological issues that have arisen since the first attempts to analyse convergence and critically surveying the results that have been obtained for different...

This chapter focuses on the geographic dimensions of knowledge spillovers. The starting point comes from the economics of innovation and technological change. This tradition focused on the innovation production function however it was aspatial or insensitive to issues involving location and...

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,...