| The Geographical Economic Agglomeration Model (GEAM) has been developed by T.M. Stelder in the course of his PhD reseach in 2005 (Regions and Cities: Five Essays on Interregional Input-output and Spatial Agglomeration, Groningen; Stichting Ruimtelijke Economie Groningen, 2005). GEAM simulates urban agglomeration based on the recent literature on NEG (New Economic Geography). It uses geographical which are approximations of continuous space. Various model implementations have been constructed for Europe and Japan. The program has been operational since 2000, first in Gauss and Pascal code, and recently rewritten in C++ code. It is applied by various urban agglomeration researchers in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the USA. It is also used for educational purposes by students at the University of Groningen. Future applications will be for evaluation studies of regional infrastructure policy, simulation of transition periods going from one historical urban distribution to the next, and for an assessment of "first nature economies" that measures the extent to which physical geography is determing urban structures. Finally, the EU has recently shown interest in a study on agglomeration effects of economic integration such as the extension of the EU with former East-European countries. For this a larger implementaion of GEAM is under construction (The use of geographical grids models in NEG: assessing the effects of EU integration,T.M. Stelder, Vienna: Osterreiche Nationalbank 2006, forthcoming) |
