Economic activities are not concentrated on the head of a pin, nor are they spread evenly over a featureless plane. On the contrary, they are distributed very unequally across locations, regions and countries. Even though economic activities are, to some extent, spatially concentrated because of natural features, economic mechanisms that rely on the trade-off between various forms of increasing returns and different types of mobility costs are more fundamental. This book is a study of the economic reasons for the existence of a large variety of agglomerations arising from the global to the local. This second edition combines a comprehensive analysis of the fundamentals of spatial economics and an in-depth discussion of the most recent theoretical developments in new economic geography and urban economics. It aims to highlight several of the major economic trends observed in modern societies

1. Agglomeration and economic theory
Part I. Fundamentals of Spatial Economics:
2. The breakdown of the price system in a spatial economy
3. The von Thünen model and land rent formation
4. Increasing returns vs. transportation costs: the fundamental trade-off of spatial economics
5. Cities and the public sector
Part II. The Structure of Metropolitan Areas:
6. The spatial structure of cities under communication externalities
7. The formation of urban centers under imperfect competition
Part III. Factor Mobility and Industrial Location:
8. Industrial agglomeration under monopolistic competition
9. Market size and industrial clusters
Part IV. Urban Systems, Regional Growth, and the Multinationalization of Firms:
10. Back to von Thünen: the formation of cities in a spatial economy
11. Globalization, growth, and the geography of the supply chain.
AuthorsMasahisa Fujita, Kyoto University, Japan
Masahisa Fujita, a member of the Japan Academy and the President of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, has been a major contributor to spatial economic theory during his twenty-year tenure at the University of Pennsylvania and more recently at Kyoto University and Konan University. Professor Fujita is the author or co-author of three books: Spatial Development Planning (1978); Urban Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1989), which remains to this day the most authoritative graduate textbook on urban economics; and The Spatial Economy (1999, co-authored with Paul Krugman and A. J. Venables), which defines the field of new economic geography.
Jacques-Francois Thisse, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Jacques-François Thisse, a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the Regional Science Association International, is Professor of Economics at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and the Higher School of Economics (Russia). He has published in numerous journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the International Economic Review, Management Science, Exploration in Economic History, and the Journal of Economic Geography. He is the co-author of Discrete Choice Theory of Product Differentiation, Economic Geography, and Economic Geography and the Unequal Development of Regions. Professors Fujita and Thisse co-authored the first edition of Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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