The existence and persistence of large spatial disparities in unemployment within national economies is a central issue in regional economics. Previous empirical analyses have largely disregarded the role of fundamentals. On the contrary in this paper we explore the link between labour...

It is customary in the empirical trade literature to analyze specialization patterns of countries using Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) measures. This paper explores the pros and cons of the most commonly used RCA index: the Balassa (1965) Index of RCA. After describing the properties of...