Agglomeration, Integration, and Territorial Authority Scale in a System of Trading Cities. Centralisation versus Devolution

Massimo Del Gatto

No 2004.93, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government) involved in the authority to decide on Spatial Policy, and propose a model of 'agglomeration in a system of cities' in which both intra-city trade and inter-city trade are considered. Enriching both the literature on integration/agglomeration and that on city size and formation, we show that: i) devolution results in over-agglomeration (fewer cities, which tend to be over-sized) and low welfare; ii) the higher the level of spatial (i.e. transport costs) and economic (i.e. intensity of trade) integration, the higher is the magnitude of the inefficiency. From a theoretical point of view, the paper represents an attempt to import, into geographical economics, a 'scale approach', which is an established approach to the notion of space in sociology.

Keywords: Agglomeration; Integration; Cities; Devolution; Economic geography; Transport costs; Spatial policy; Trade; Product variety; Linkages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 F15 L11 L13 R12 R13 R59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... oads/NDL2004-093.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2004.93

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).