In this paper, based on the recent advances in the new economic geography (e.g., Fujita et al. [12]), we analyze impacts of transport costs on the spatial patterns of economic agglomeration. We first identify prototypes from the existing models, and explain the mechanism of how transport costs...

We propose a statistical index of industrial localization based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence. This index is particularly well suited to cases where industrial data are available only at the regional level. Unlike existing regional-level indices, our index can be employed to test the...

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...