This Paper argues that a geographical perspective is fundamental to understanding comparative economic development in the context of globalization. Central to this view is the role of agglomeration in productivity performance; size and location matter. The tools of the new economic geography are...

This Paper first develops a tractable economic geography model we use to investigate the decline of transport costs as a cause of regional inequalities. Next, we perform a structural estimation of this model using a new dataset on road transport costs between the 341 French Employment Areas. We...

This Paper estimates the agglomeration benefits that arise from vertical linkages between firms. The analysis is based on international trade and economic geography theory developed by Krugman and Venables (1995). We identify the agglomeration benefits of the spatial variation in firm level...

This Paper surveys the empirical literature on the economic geography of trade flows, factor prices, and the location of production. The discussion is structured around the empirical predictions of a canonical theoretical model. We review empirical evidence on the determinants of trade costs and...

This Paper examines how the geography of UK international trade has changed since the UK’s accession to the European Economic Community using a newly constructed dataset that gives a detailed breakdown of the UK’s imports and exports by both port of entry and exit, and commodity. Our results...

This Paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This Paper investigates the determinants of countries’ export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries’ exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from...

This paper combines establishment level production data with international trade data by port to examine the impact of accession to the EEC on the spatial distribution of UK manufacturing. We use this data to test the predictions from economic geography models of how external trade affects the...

Do workers in countries located far from global economic activity have lower incentives to accumulate human capital than workers near the centre? This Paper models the relationship between countries’ distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education, and economic...