Cátedra Santander en Eficiencia y Productividad

Title: Economic Geography and Infrastructures: Implications for Agglomeration and Regional Cohesion

Speaker: Javier Barbero

Date: 14/04/2016 11:00

Location: Sala de Seminarios, Edificio Torretamarit

Abstract:

Economic geography is the study of where economic activity takes place and what are the underlying forces explaining it. To the traditional questions that economics aims to answer – what to produce, how to produce, and for whom to produce – economic geography adds a new important one: where to produce. In this talk research results of a doctoral thesis on how accessibility and market size affects the location of economic activity are presented. Resorting on network theory we are able to model the transportation infrastructure of a country and, depending on the network topology, determine how economic activity is unevenly distributed across space. This allows us to draw policy implications on ow infrastructure policy should be targeted to increase cohesion between regions.

Brief Bio:

Javier Barbero is Ph.D. in Economics and he holds MSc in International Economic by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He received a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education in 2012. He has made research stays at the Université du Québec à Montréal and at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His research fields are economic theory, spatial economics, location theory, and the introduction of network theory and computational methods in economic analysis, among others. He participates as a researcher in projects financed by ministries and public and private administrations.