Universidad Carlos III, Madrid (in cooperation with the Centre for
the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, The University of
Warwick).

How did the economic geography of Europe evolve over time? How did
the centres of population and economic activity shift during the 20th
century? What are the patterns of regional specialisation and
localisation between 1900 and 2000 and what factors explain these
changes? And how did this changing economic geography feedback into
economic developments?

This two day workshop aims at bringing together scholars interested
in European economic geography to promote research in his thriving
field of empirical economics. The focus lies on papers that present
new data and discuss methodological aspects to the analysis of
economic geography. Papers will deal with changing patterns of employment in agriculture, manufacturing and services at an intra-national level and deal with changes in regional
wages and prices in these sectors.

Nicholas Crafts will give a keynote lecture. The organizing committee
consists of Joan Ramon Roses and Nikolaus Wolf.

1. Conference Venue:

The Conference will place take at Campus of Colmenarejo, located in this village about 45 km Northwest Madrid. The direction of the campus is:

Avd. de la Universidad Carlos III, 22

28270 Colmenarejo, Madrid (SPAIN)

Lodging is also at Campus at the Residencia de Estudiantes "Antonio Machado".

2. How to arrive?

From airport:

• You will arrive to terminals T4 (mainly Iberia, Vueling and BEA flights) or T1-T2-T3 (the rest of Flights).
• Take the Metro (Line 8) at the same terminal to Nuevos Ministerios Station (end of the line).
• Then, change of line to Line 6 and take the metro to Moncloa Station.
• Once in Moncloa Station, you move to Bus Station (Intercambiador de Moncloa), the Bus station is directly connected to the Metro Station, and take the Bus 631 to Colmenarejo (the Bus takes 40-45min. and finishes at Campus).

3. Links for further information:

University at Colmenarejo:

http://www.uc3m.es/uc3m/serv/ACC/admon.html

Residencia

http://www.fundacion.uc3m.es/residencias/Res_Estudiantes/uc3m_index.htm

Metro Map

http://www.metromadrid.es/acc_resources/pdfs/Plano_Metro_2007.pdf

Bus information:

http://www.uc3m.es/uc3m/serv/ACC/transportespublicos.html

4. Conference schedule

Conference schedule

5. Lecturer's papers

NICHOLAS CRAFTS and TIMOTHY LEUNIG(corresponding author)

Transport improvements, agglomeration economies and city productivity: at what point did nineteenth century transport improvements raise British wages?

"New economic geography" finds that the city agglomeration productivity effect comes not only from the size of the city itself, but from the size of its hinterland. Firms in the city are easily able to talk to suppliers, customers and other firms in the hinterland, improving their information set and decision making, whilst those who live in the hinterland can commute to the city, so contributing to agglomeration economies. The nineteenth century saw the rise first of railways and then of trams, allowing such activities to occur for the first time. Did this lead to a rise in productivity? We find that the size of a city’s hinterland had no effect on productivity in the nineteenth century. The cost of train travel, relative to earnings, remained high. But by the first decade of the twentieth century things had changed: train fares fell significantly relative to earnings, and convenient and very low cost trams became common. The productivity effect was real, but lower than is found in Britain today, probably reflecting the relative fall in the time, money and discomfort cost of travel in the last one hundred years. Nevertheless, we estimate that agglomeration economies raised urban wages by around 14%, and GDP in England and Wales by around 8%. This is in addition to earlier social savings estimates, and implies that railways and trams were worth around 14% of GDP by 1906.

MARTA FELIS ROTA

Economic Geography and International Inequality: A Reappraisal

This paper replicates Redding and Venables (2004) series for Market Access for 1994 in order to re-estimate the GDP equation with alternative socio-institutional measures. Using the newly created series together with more standard socio-institutional indicators allows testing where does cross-country variation in the performance of the Market Access index arise from. The results show that the Redding and Venables (2004) results are not unconditional. Poor institutional quality undermines the positive benefits of geographical location. Only when a country enjoys high enough institutional quality can it effectively benefit from accessibility to markets.

PERNILLA JONSSON and FREDERIK SANDGREN

Regional economic development and the relation between towns and rural industry in Sweden 1820-96

The digitalised material from the Swedish Table Commission (Tabellverket, DDB Umeå University) and the Central Bureau of Statistics are extraordinarily detailed sources with information about Swedish population, mortality, diseases and occupations in Swedish urban and rural parishes from 1749. This paper uses the material to study the relation between rural industry and urban service functions in two regions of Sweden 1820-96. The conclusion is that the general dynamic influence of towns on rural industry highlighted in many British studies cannot be found in Sweden. Despite an overall increase in trade, financial services and information during the nineteenth century, Swedish towns did not in general serve as stimulating relays for surrounding industry. Only in 1890 nonextractive gained from proximity to a town. Instead parish specific endowments such as communications, specialization in agriculture and access to raw materials mattered.

JULIO MARTÍNEZ-GALARRAGA

New Estimates of Regional GDP in Spain, 1860-1930

This paper presents a new regional database on GDP in Spain for the years 1860, 1900, 1914 and 1930. Following Geary and Stark (2002), country level GDP estimates are allocated across Spanish provinces. The results are then compared with previous estimates. Further, this new evidence is used to analyze the evolution of regional inequality and convergence in the long run. According to the distribution dynamics approach suggested by Quah (1993, 1996) persistence appears as a main feature in the regional distribution of output. Therefore, in the long run no evidence of regional convergence in the Spanish economy is found.

ROMAN RÖMISCH

Regional Industry Specialisation and Concentration in the EU-27

The aim of this study is to update and extend previous studies on the extent of the specialisation of regions in particular sectors of economic activity and on the concentration of sectors in particular regions. (Hallet (2000) and Roemisch and Ward (2004)) Although the two tend to some extent to be related, this is not necessarily the case since industries can be predominantly concentrated in a few regions without this implying that economic activity in the regions concerned is concentrated in the industries in question. The concern is to measure the scale of differences in the current structure of economic activity across regions in the EU-27 regions and the changes in this which have occurred over recent years.

This analysis is not just of academic interest and a means of increasing our understanding of the process of economic development across EU regions. It has important implications for regional development policy, in that it throws light on the kinds of structural change which can be expected to occur as economic development takes place and on the extent to which such changes are common across regions. The greater, therefore, the degree of regional specialisation in particular activities and the more this tends to increase over time, the greater the need for policy to be differentiated across the EU. Conversely, the less the degree of specialisation and the more the composition of economic activity across regions tends to converge towards a common structure, the greater the relevance of factors at regional level which either facilitate or impede the structural change in question and the development of the sectors in which growth can be expected to occur.

Similarly, the more that particular activities are concentrated in a limited number of locations and the greater the gains from clustering which this tends to suggest, the more difficult is it likely to be to develop the activities concerned elsewhere. In order to keep the analysis the results manageable the 257 EU-27 NUTS2 regions have been grouped in three different ways. Firstly the regions were classified to three groups, according to the GDP per head (in PPS terms) of the country in which they are located. Secondly, five regional groupings were distinguished according to the level of GDP per head (again in PPS terms) in each of the regions. Thirdly, the regions were grouped into six clusters according to the relative importance of broad sectors of economic activity.

The analysis is based on a set of indices which are designed to quantify a) the degree of overall regional specialisation, b) the degree of regional specialisation in particular industries or sectors, c) the extent of concentration of industries or sectors across the EU-27 regions, d) the tendency of industries to cluster in particular locations, and, finally, e) the correlation between regional GDP per head and the sectoral structure of activity.

KARL-JOHAN LUNDQUIST, LARS-OLOF OLANDER and MARTIN SVENSSON HENNING

Tracking Regional Roles during the Technology Shift. Economic Transformation and Changes in Regional Division of Labour in Sweden 1974-2004

In this paper we investigate changes in regional division of labour in the Swedish economy between 1978 and 2004. More specifically, we will inquire what changing roles in the national production system various kinds of regions have played during different phases of economic development. The theoretical base of the paper is a modernized version of the systemic approach, where a regional system is regarded as consisting of regions with complementary roles and relations in terms of production relationships as well as technology- and growth diffusion. Moreover, inspired by findings of economic history and evolutionary economics, our approach acknowledges the evolutionary arguments concerning path-dependency and the need for a long term perspective in the analysis of economic transformation and growth.

So far, longitudinal research approaches concerning the Swedish case have been concerned primarily with the regional transformation of the manufacturing sector. However, in an increasingly ‘learning’ economy, the regional development of manufacturing sectors and changes in regional division of labour cannot be understood isolated from that of producer services. Phenomena such as outsourcing and service encapsulation are blurring the boundaries between the sectors and give rise to new and changed relations between service and manufacturing. Thus, in order to asses the longitudinal changes in regional division of labour and to be able to analyse their consequences, we have to take the performance of producer services as well as manufacturing into account. This we will do in the paper, where we use data from the Databases of EVolutionary economic geography In Lund (DEVIL).

We suggest that the recent technology shift has dramatically changed the regional geographies of Sweden, that this to a large extent could be connected to the new economic transformation pressures of this technology shift process, and as a consequence of this that regional roles differ in the various phases of economic transformation.

DANIEL A. TIRADO, JORDI PONS, ELISENDA PALUZIE and JAVIER SILVESTRE

Migrants and Market Potential in Spain over the XXth Century: A Test of the New Economic Geography

This study reports an empirical analysis of a theoretical model developed within the framework of NEG that is based on the examination of the forward effect which relates migrants’ decision making with the market potential of the regions. In so doing, we chose three cut off times representing three key periods in the long-term industrialisation of a country, Spain, and used various migration equations. Specifically, we used estimations derived directly from the theoretical model, as well as non structural estimations that allowed us to draw comparisons.

Our results show that Spanish migrants have been attracted by the productive agglomerations in each of the three periods analysed. In other words, that elements favouring agglomerations, such as those proposed in NEG, were present both in the phases of concentration and in the phases of the spatial redistribution of activity.

Our results also show, however, that the estimated values of the parameters of the various migration equations have been modified over time. These changes allow us to account for the shift in tendency in the concentration of migratory flows in a context in which migrants continue to be attracted by major agglomerations.

EMANUELE FELICE

Income and Human Development: Measuring Regional Disparities in Italy

Italy is probably the European country with the widest and historically deep-rooted regional disparities within it, at least (but maybe not only) in economic terms. There is a huge literature dealing with the so-called «questione meridionale» – the social, cultural and economic backwardness of southern Italy – a literature dating back to the end of the XIX century. During the very last decades analyses and researches about the remarkable performances of other parts of the country, namely the north-eastern and central regions (Nec), have been flourishing too. We should add that in the second half of the XX century policy makers devoted many efforts to overcome the historical North-South divide, performing a massive regional policy mostly by way of the so-called «Cassa per il Mezzogiorno», yet with largely disappointing results.

Measuring regional disparities is a first and necessary step before trying to analyse their historical trends. Yet in Italy (as indeed in most of the countries) reliable data on regional income are available only from the second half of the XX century. This is the reason why, already by the end of the XIX century, some of the most relevant Italian thinkers (one of them, Nitti, who was prime minister) were arguing over the real extent of the North-South divide, in the 50 years after Unification. During the second half of the XX century, economic historians have been puzzling with the same questions, in some cases (from the seventies) producing new estimates of regional income. The debate is still going on, my recent estimates of regional value added for benchmark years from 1891 to 1951[1] being one of the last contributions.

Yet in order to catch the effective levels of well-being, an analysis focusing only on value added would be inadequate. In modern societies income is the key economic index, but it is not the only determinant of the standard of living. Particularly as economic development goes on, when almost everyone can satisfy the basic needs of «food» and «shelter», changes in income per capita can be unrelated with real changes in the level of well-being. Among the economists who have recognized this, Nobel prize Amartya Sen [1984; 1991; 1992; 1999; Anand, Sen 1993] has given the most important contribution to the building of a new indicator, known as human development index (Hdi), which should be more fit for approximating the «quality of life». Sen’s approach rests on the idea of capability: according to him well-being is produced by a combination of the satisfaction of material needs, with a long and healthy life and the capacity of «choice», this last assured by an adequate education. These three factors, that is material resources, longevity and education, can be recognized as the three basic components of human life, in a broader view of economic growth aiming to include freedom and social development [United Nations 1994; 2005].

If income (value added) per capita can approximate resources, life expectancy at birth is, of course, the most appropriate index for longevity. The third one, education, is usually defined as a weighted mean of the adult literacy rate and the gross enrolment ratio. Hdi is given by the sum of these three indices, previously normalized. Officially adopted by the United Nations, Hdi was the object of many criticisms but also the only index which could seriously defy the long-standing primacy of income per capita, undisputed from the 1930s [Mamalakis 1996]; the reputation of Hdi is also due to the fact that it has a major ethical (and for some instances political) significance, for example taking into account – although indirectly – the effects of social and environmental policies.

This paper aims at building and briefly discussing regional estimates not only of income per capita, but also of life expectancy, education and hence of human development, for benchmark years from 1871/1891[2] up to 2001. For the 1891-1951 period income figures are taken from my cited works on regional value added, for the following years from official sources. Estimates of education are drawn from Istat data, yet with some caveats and variants that will be discussed. Estimates of life expectancy have been mostly taken from a working paper by Conte, Della Torre and Vasta [2001], and are unpublished at present. Finally, the three indices are put together in order to build a regional human development index (Hdi), for benchmark years from 1891 to 2001. For macro-regional areas (North-West, North-East-Centre and Mezzogiorno) both Hdi and income per capita are compared with those of other European and extra-European countries.

[1] Published in “Rivista di Storia Economica”, 2005, nn. 1 and 3.

[2] Life expectancy and education refer to 1871, income to 1891.