An Empirical Framework for Studying Spatial Patterns and Causal Relationships of Economic Agglomeration

This project develops a unified empirical framework to study spatial patterns and causal relationships of economic agglomerations. Unlike the existing approaches, each individual agglomeration is identified on a map, and both the local spatial properties of individual agglomerations and the global spatial patterns of all agglomerations are studied simultaneously. From the spatial coordination among different industries and different types of research and development (R&D) activities, this framework enables us to identify economic regions, in each of which trade and research interactions are relatively more dense and self-contained. As an economic region generally extends well beyond the administrative regions, it can be considered as the basis of regional policy coordination toward sustainable regional development. The framework is applied to describe the evolution of regional industrial structure in Japan after 1980.

June 27, 2016 - May 31, 2018