The empirics of economic geography: How to draw policy implications?

Pierre-Philippe Combes (1)

1 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille

Using both reduced-form and structural approaches, the spectrum of policy recommendations that can be drawn from empirical economic geography is pretty large. Reduced-form approaches allow the researchers to consider many variables that impact on regional disparities, as long as they are careful about interpretation and endogeneity issues. Structural approaches have the opposite advantages. Less issues can be simultaneously addressed, but one can be more precise in terms of which intuitions are considered and the underlying mechanisms and effects at work. Many regional policy issues remain unanswered, opening some interesting future lines of research.

Mots clés: agglomeration economies; regional policy; structural estimation; instrumental variables

Domaines: Economies et finances

Pierre-Philippe Combes. The empirics of economic geography: How to draw policy implications?. 2010. ⟨halshs-00536078⟩