"The purpose of our book is to offer an introduction to urban and geographical economics, the two dominant approaches in mainstream economics to explain the distribution of economic activity across space. The fact that we offer an 'introduction' does not mean that we avoid models or shy away...

We combine a key issue in development economics (explaining core-periphery patterns) for the first time with an analysis of unilateral transfers (foreign aid) using a New Economic Geography model. We show that (i) direct transfer paradoxes are not possible in a symmetric setting even if a...