Agglomeration and the perspective of the Periphery

A fairly abundant literature exists on the agglomeration and concentration of industries and on the specialisation of countries and regions especially after the New Economic Geography (NEG) came into fashion. Most of this recent literature put its primary focus on the manufacturing sector of the economy rather than the agricultural sector, as well as on the core rather than the periphery in core-periphery models. The agricultural sector received comparatively little attention regarding its impact on agglomeration, and/or how such processes affect it. In other words, the periphery is somewhat left behind although this seems not to be necessarily justifiable at a European level, where a substantial amount of funding goes into agriculture. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide an incentive to pull everything related to “agriculture” or the “periphery” a bit more into the focus of research. We try to achieve this in a threefold way: (i) to survey the existing theoretical and empirical literature in the field of NEG, in order to (ii) elaborate the linkages of this literature to immobile factors such as land, land-intensive productive activities, agriculture, rural areas, or the periphery, and (iii) to make use of all these contributions to suggest and discuss some future lines of research in the field. Section 2 analyses the main features of the broad variety of NEG-models. Section 3 reviews the empirical literature on the agglomeration issue, which turns out to be vital for rural areas too. Sections 4 focuses on the agricultural sector and the periphery, going deeper into the aspects of the rural-urban interdependence (§4.1) and providing some suggestions for further research - still with a NEG "flavour" - on remote and/or rural areas (§4.2). Section 5 concludes, and provides some perspectives for future research.