This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

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...

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

We show in the context of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-regional trade. Labor heterogeneity gives local monopoly power to firms but also introduces variations in the quality of the job match....

This paper describes a methodology to develop a Computable General Equilibrium model with a sub-national detail starting from a global database and model presenting the country-level as the highest resolution. This procedure is demonstratively applied to Italy, but can be transferred to any...

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

Water resources are unevenly spread in China. Especially the basins of the Yellow, Hui and Hai rivers in the North are rather dry. To increase the supply of water in these basins, the South-to-North Water Transfer project (SNWT) was launched. Using a computable general equilibrium model this...

China’s rampant environmental pollution problems and rising greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting climate change are undermining its long-term economic growth. China, from its own perspective cannot afford to and, from an international perspective, is not meant to continue on the...

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects without missing other important channels of adjustment. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial equilibrium model that accounts for a number of real world effects of trade...

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate a structural equation derived directly from Heckscher- Ohlin theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments and relative prices....