Authors' Words

Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Globalization (2nd Edition)

Author's Introduction

Book to Understand the Latest in Spatial Economics and Urban Economics in an Integrated Manner

This book is the revised version of Economics of Agglomeration co-authored by Jacques-Francois Thisse and Masahisa Fujita and published in 2002. Spatial economics is one of the frontiers of economics, and it has been rapidly evolving among economists in Japan, the United States, and Europe since the early 1990s. Its basic theory was published in 1999 as The Spatial Economy, co-authored by Princeton University Professor Paul Krugman, Oxford University Professor Anthony Venables, and Fujita. However, as the book mainly focused on international economics and regional economics, insufficient attention was paid to urban economics (especially internal structure of cities and its land use). Ever since Economics of Agglomeration was published in 2002 in pursuit of integrating spatial economics and urban economics, it has been widely used by graduate students and scholars around the world as the first textbook that unifies both fields. As the fields have grown at a fast pace since its publication, Cambridge University Press has kindly offered us the opportunity to prepare the second edition, and completely updating the recent evolution of the fields. In particular, the latter half of the book has been significantly revised, incorporating the recent research results in the fields of new economic geography (NEG) and international trade theory. It is hoped that this second edition will be as widely used as the first edition.