Agglomeration and growth with endogenous expenditure shares

Abstract

We develop a New Economic Geography and Growth model which, by using a CES utility function in the second-stage optimization problem, allows for expenditure shares in industrial goods to be endogenously de- termined. The implications of our generalization are quite relevant. In particular, we obtain the following novel results: 1) catastrophic agglom- eration may always take place, whatever the degree of market integration, provided that the traditional and the industrial goods are su¢ ciently good substitutes; 2) the regional rate of growth is a¤ected by the interregional allocation of economic activities even in the absence of localized spillovers, so that geography always matters for growth and 3) the regional rate of growth is a¤ected by the degree of market openness: in particular, depend- ing on whether the traditional and the industrial goods are good or poor substitutes, economic integration may be respectively growth-enhancing or growth-detrimental