Spatial economy: high-tech glossary or new regional economics?

"The Spatial Economy Cities, Regions and International Trade", by Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, has been seen as the best synthesis of the so-called new economic geography. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to review the book; and second, to place it in the current debate on regional economics. The first part of the paper is a brief introduction that situates the book in the history of regional economics. In the second part, a description and analysis of the basic models, their variations and applications are presented. The debate on regional economics concerning the theory proposed in the book is in the third part. Two aspects are stressed: the criticisms on the core-periphery model and how it incorporates regional diversity The fourth topic is a critical assessment of the achievements and originality of the new economic geography analysis.regional economics; economic geography; industrial agglomerations; monopolistic competition

A defense of an entropy based index of multigroup segregation

This paper defends the use of the entropy based Mutual Information index of multigroup segregation for the following five reasons. (1) It satisfies 14 basic axioms discussed in the literature when segregation takes place along a single dimension. (2) It is additively decomposable into between- and within-group terms for any partition of the set of occupations (or schools) and the set of demographic groups in the multigroup case. (3) The underlying segregation ordering has been recently characterized in terms of 8 properties. (4) It is a monotonic transformation of log-likelihood tests for the existence of segregation in a general model. (5) It can be decomposed so that a term independent of changes in either of the two marginal distributions can be isolated in pair wise segregation comparisons. Other existing measures of segregation have not been characterized, fail to satisfy one or more of the basic axioms, do not admit a between- within-group decomposition, have not been motivated from a statistical approach, or are based on more restricted econometric models

The axiomatic properties of an entropy based index of segregation

This paper reviews the properties suggested in the methodological literature on the measurement of occupational gender segregation. It is found that an index of (relative) segregation based on the entropy concept, IE, satisfies thirteen basic axioms previously proposed in the single-dimensional case, and can be expressed as the sum of a between-group and a within-group term both for any partition of the set of occupations and in the two-dimensional case