Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for economic development? This paper sketches a model of spatial dynamics over a...

This paper presents a dynamic, two-region general equilibrium model in which inter-regional production and trade patterns are endogenously determined. Localized growth stems from geographical concentration of an industrial sector exhibiting permanent productivity increases. Geographical...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

This paper studies the long run development of U.S. counties and metro areas from 1800 to 2000. In earlier periods smaller counties converge whereas larger counties diverge. Over time, due to changes in the age composition of locations and net congestion, convergence dissipates and divergence...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

This paper studies the recent spatial development of India. Services, and to a lesser extent manufacturing, are increasingly concentrating in high-density clusters. This stands in contrast with the United States, where in the last decades services have tended to grow fastest in medium-density...

Emerging world countries have experienced over the last two decades a significant change in their trade patterns. Bold trade reforms have been followed by rapid rises in international trade levels. However, despite these radical changes, we know remarkably little about how changes in trade...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural-urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural-urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an economy...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of entrepreneurial activity in a cross section of German regions for the period 1998-2005. Departing from the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, the focus of our analysis is on the role of the regional environment and, in particular,...

We investigate the sources of productivity convergence using panel data for the Spanish regions. As a framwork, we develop a simple descriptive growth model which allows for factor accumulation, technological diffusion and rate effects from human capital and which includes fixed regional effects...