In this paper we analyze the role played by Market access to explain income disparities among Japanese Prefectures for different periods of time. The results of the estimations suggest that 1) Market access plays an important role in the explanation of income disparities in Japan, 2) the effect...

This paper investigates how the interactions between product differentiation, transport costs and urban costs determine spatial inequality in a general-equilibrium model. We shed light on the interrelation between different definitions of home market effect (HME) in literature. While the wages...

This paper revisits the home market effect (HME) without any homogeneous good by reconstructing the footloose capital model. This simple model analytically reproduces some typical results scattered in the existing literature, and also provides new insights. Firstly, we derive both spatial...

In New Trade Theory models, the larger region hosts an overproportionate share of producers. This Home Market Effect (HME) exacerbates regional income discrepancies caused by trade frictions or technology differences. With homogeneous firms, it requires inter-industry reallocations to emerge. We...

This paper attempts to model directly the "folk theorem" of spatial economics, according to which increasing returns to scale are essential for understanding the geographical distributions of activity. The model uses the simple structure of most New Economic Geography papers, with two identical...

Globalization and European integration are substantially changing the interregional division of labor in Europe and the industrial specialization of European regions, thereby potentially affecting the extent of disparities between countries and regions. This paper reviews several theoretical...

New Economic Geography (NEG) has reached a theoretical consolidation while related empirical tests are still scarce. The present paper aims at providing some evidence on the validity of forces emphasised by NEG. The analysis starts from the nominal wage equation derived from the Krugman...

We study the effect of international trade and freeness of trade (openness) on interregional inequality within countries. We estimate a model derived from a structural economic-geography approach in which interregional inequality depends on weighted trade shares and trade costs. In addition to...