In the second half of the twentieth century, the Italian government carried out a massive regional policy in southern Italy, through the State-owned agency «Cassa per il Mezzogiorno» (1950-1986). The article reconstructs the activities of the Cassa, by taking advantage of its yearly reports....

A textbook on European economic integration. The book presents readers with a brief but comprehensive overview of the processes of European economic integration taking place after the Second World War, with the main aim of presenting them from an economic perspective. This book attempts to...

Japan’s national hospital system, which consists of a combination of private, national, prefectural and metropolitan hospitals, is the largest employers of the of the doctors. The article provides details on the women doctors’ discontinuous workforce participation in the Japanese hospital...

The aim of this paper is to analyse, through a theoretical model, the effects that the trade integration of two countries may have on industrial location, growth and welfare. The conclusions reached finally depend both on whether the import or the export costs are affected by the trade policies...

The New Economic Geography framework supports the idea that economic integration plays an important role in explaining urban concentration. By using Fujita et al. (1999) as a theoretical motivation, and information on the 5 most important cities of 84 countries, we find that the size of main...

In 2008, Paul Krugman from Princeton University was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences by the Central Bank of Sweden, for his “analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”. In this paper we survey the literature, known as the New Economic Geography (NEG), launched...

We provide an analytical approach that facilitates understanding the bifurcation mechanism of a wide class of economic models involving spatial agglomeration of economic activities. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of the Turing (1952) approach that has been used to analyze the...

This paper shows that the evolutionary process of spatial agglomeration in multi-regional core-periphery models can be explained analytically by a much simpler method than the continuous space approach of Krugman (1996). The proposed method overcomes the limitations of Turing's approach which...