While European integration has substantially contributed to economic convergence between the member states of the EU, the diverging development of highly developed metropolitan regions and lagging rural areas has become a growing challenge especially for the new member states in Central and...

This paper surveys the literature on regional inequality in contemporary China. It reviews the trend of convergence or divergence of real GDP or income across different regions in China since 1952, and examines the degree of regional inequality using different measurements. It then discusses...

If mainstream economics teaches us one lesson, it’s that when something becomes unaffordable, it’s because of a shortage. And that brings me to the US housing crisis. In America, housing is getting less affordable. So there must be a short supply, right? Not necessarily. You see, shortage is...

In this paper, we use a new property-level dataset to estimate the price of land since 2000 for nearly 600,000 detached single-family homes in the Washington, DC metro area. We employ these estimates to characterize the recent boom/bust cycle in land prices and house prices in the Washington...

The intrinsic complexity of the sustainability concept challenges research towards more sophisticated ways to model and assess the dimensions underlying it. However, currently adopted modelling techniques and indicators frameworks are not able to give an integrated assessment through the...

The present paper analyses the expenditure behavior of Albanian families. The objective is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances, sent from abroad by household members. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of...

We derive and discuss a general, but simple geographical economics model with congestion, allowing us to explain the economic viability of small and large locations. The model generalizes some previous work and lends itself to analyzing the impact of public policy in terms of infrastructure...

This paper explores analytical tools designed to describe urban space-form structure at a global level, eventually in quantitative mode, by a configurational approach based on the Space Syntax Theory. The sample consists of 44 Brazilian cities, selected by demographic and cultural heritage...

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) can contribute to the modification and development of new patterns of behaviour by individuals in their everyday lives. The implementation of e-activities such as teleworking, tele-education or tele-shopping cut down the need for physical...

We measure technological progress in oceanic shipping by using a large database of daily log entries from ships of the British and Dutch navies and East India Companies to estimate daily sailing speed in different wind conditions from 1750 to 1850. Against the consensus, dating back to North...