Global–Local Spatial Platform for Economic Geography: Mechanism for Sustaining Bifurcation

Abstract

This paper develops a spatial platform for economic agglomerations that can represent a hierarchical structure of cities, towns, and so on. A global system models geographical distribution of a system of cities, while population size and local geography of each city are modeled by an individual square lattice network. The mechanism of economic agglomeration is described by economic geography models with the replicator dynamics. As a major theoretical contribution of this paper, we elucidate the bifurcation mechanism of the mono-centric distribution in a square domain. Such bifurcation expresses how satellite places appear around a large city. This bifurcation behavior, called sustaining bifurcation, is different from symmetry-breaking bifurcation studied in nonlinear mathematics, and is not given much attention in economic geography, despite its importance. An air-network of cities with the seven largest hub airports in USA is employed as a realistic example, and is modeled as a global–local system comprising a series of local square lattices with different sizes connected by an equidistant economy. This system for an economic geography model displays successive sustaining bifurcations occurring many times leading to gradual emergence of satellite places around a large city.