A Dynamic Spatial Model

Abstract

Any interesting model of economic geography must involve a tension between "centripetal" forces that tend to produce agglomerations and "centrifugal" forces that tend to pull them apart. This paper explores one such model, and shows that the model links together a number of themes in the geography literature. These include: the role of market access, as measured by a measure of "market potential", in determining manufacturing location; the role of forward and backward linkages in producing agglomerations; the potential for "catastrophes", i.e., discontinuous changes in location in response to small changes in exogenous variables: and the idea that the economy is a "self-organizing system" that evolves a self-sustaining locational structure.