1 - Agglomeration and Economic Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Just as matter in the solar system is concentrated in a small number of bodies (the planets and their satellites), economic life is concentrated in a fairly limited number of human settlements (cities and clusters). Furthermore, paralleling large and small planets, there are large and small settlements with very different combinations of firms and households. This book is a study of the reasons for the existence of a large variety of economic agglomerations. Even though economic activities are, to some extent, spatially concentrated because of natural features (think of rivers and harbors), our goal is to focus on economic mechanisms yielding agglomeration by relying on the trade-off between various forms of increasing returns and different types of mobility costs.
One should keep in mind that the concept of economic agglomeration refers to very distinct real-world situations. At one extreme lies the core-periphery structure corresponding to North-South dualism. For example, Hall and Jones (1999) observed that high-income nations are clustered in small industrial cores in the Northern Hemisphere and that productivity per capita steadily declines with distance from these cores.
As noted by many historians and development theorists, economic growth tends to be localized. This is especially well illustrated by the rapid growth of East Asia during the last few decades. We view East Asia here as comprising Japan and nine other countries, that is, Republic of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China.
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- Economics of AgglomerationCities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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