There is a certain degree of consensus that economic activity is more concentrated in the US than in Europe. In this paper we aim to test the empirical validity of such a proposition, identifying the sectors for which this assertion is more appropriate and determining their predictable future...

Paul Krugman developed a general equilibrium model with two sectors and two regions in 1991, from which two patterns of industrial localization could be endogenously deduced, dispersion at 50% and total concentration. The introduction of transport costs, which depend on the size of the...

In this paper, we present an extension to Krugman's core-periphery model-namely, the introduction of the public sector as a new economic agent. There are two main results: first, we demonstrate theoretically that regions with a lower tax-burden in net terms, in the sense of having lower taxes...

In this paper we analyse whether different infrastructures affect the location decisions of economic agents. Taking the model in Martin and Rogers (1995), a complete range of infrastructure classes that a region can have is considered. We consider domestic, international transport, international...

The industrial landscape of the U.S. has undergone major changes in the last three decades, which have affected the location of the work-force as much as sector location. This paper adopts a dynamic approach in order to analyse the principal characteristics of this process in the time-period...

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat’s Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. For this we use different...

In this paper, an analysis is made of the evolution of Spanish urban structure during the period 1900-99. It is postulated that the size distribution of the cities follows a Pareto distribution, which is estimated on a yearly basis. At the same time, the hypothesis is adopted that the...

This paper analyses in detail the features offered by three distributions used in urban economics to describe city size distributions: lognormal, q-exponential and double Pareto lognormal, and another one of use in other areas of economics: the log-logistic. We use a large database which covers...

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

The fragile and structurally weak rural areas, in European Union terminology, are areas with important difficulties in maintaining their population and highly peripheral in nature. Generally, they have an aged population, a low density of population, a weight of the primary sector higher than...