TY  - JOUR
AU  - Krugman,Paul
AU  - Venables,Anthony J.
TI  - The Seamless World: A Spatial Model of International Specialization
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5220
PY  - 1995
Y2  - August 1995
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5220
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5220.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Paul R. Krugman
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton, NJ  08544
Tel: 609/258-4570
Fax: 609/258-2809
E-Mail: pkrugman@princeton.edu

Anthony Venables
Department of Economics
University of Oxford
Manor Road Building
Manor Road
Oxford OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom
and CEPR
E-Mail: tony.venables@economics.ox.ac.uk
AB  - This paper is an effort to do international trade theory without mentioning countries.  Nearly all models of the international economy assume that trade takes place between nations or regions which are themselves dimensionless points.  We develop a model in which economic space is instead assumed to be continuous, and in which this 'seamless world' spontaneously organizes itself into industrial and agricultural zones because of the tension between forces of agglomeration and disagglomeration.  One might expect such a model to be analytically intractable, but we are able to gain considerable insight through a combination of simulations and an analytical approach originally suggested in a biological context by Alan Turing.
ER  -