AGGLOMERATION PATTERNS IN NEW ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY MODELS TO EVALUATE THE IMPACT OF TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS

Abstract

 A recent study by Akamatsu et al.¹⁾ has provided a simple classification of economic geography models according to their comparative static properties with respect to transport costs in a homogeneous geographical space. This study clarifies that models belonging to different classes have qualitatively different behavior even when evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure improvement in a heterogeneous geographical space. Specifically, by comparing a pair of new economic geography models, Helpman¹³⁾ and Pflüger and Tabuchi¹⁷⁾, we demonstrate that an improvement in transport access disperses population from larger regions in the former model, while it enlarges the population size of larger ones in the latter.