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

This paper presents an overview of recent development in the new economic geography (NEG), and discusses possible directions of its future development. Since there already exist several surveys on this topic, we focus on the selected features of the NEG which are important yet have attracted...

The spatial distribution of industries and population is quite lumpy, and this lumpiness varies across industries. Nevertheless, we show using Japanese data for metropolitan areas that the locations of both industries and population are linked by surprisingly simple and persistent patterns. In...

An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by Mori, Nishikimi and Smith [71], and has since been extended to the US by Hsu [50]. This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

The standard approaches to studying industrial agglomeration have been in terms of summary measures of the “degree of agglomeration” within each industry. But such measures often fail to distinguish between industries that exhibit substantially different spatial scales of agglomeration. In a...

The standard approach to studying industrial agglomeration is to construct summary measures of the “degree of agglomeration” within each industry and to test for significant agglomeration with respect to some appropriate reference measure. But such summary measures often fail to distinguish...

Dating from the seminal work of Ellison and Glaeser [17] in 1997, a wealth of evidence for the ubiquity of industrial agglomerations has been published. However, most of these results are based on analyses of single (scalar) indices of agglomeration. Hence it is not surprising that industries...

An empirical regularity designated as the Number-Average Size (NAS) Rule was first identified for the case of Japan by Mori, Nishikimi and Smith [13], and has since been extended to the US by Hsu [6]. This rule asserts a negative log-linear relation between the number and average population size...

The spatial structure of transport network is subject to increasing returns in transportation, distance and density economies. Transport costs between locations are thus in general endogenous, and are determined by the interaction between the spatial distribution of transport demand and these...