Fiscal Competition, Convergence and Agglomeration

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal competition through infrastructure in a New Economic Geography framework. It is shown that regional competition leads to convergence if the trade costs are high but induces divergence if trade cost have fallen below a certain value. Moreover, fiscal competition yields an overprovision if the trade costs are sizable while it leads to underprovision if the regions are highly integrated. Finally, a trade-off between regional convergence and efficiency arises since the efficient distribution of regional infrastructure requires full agglomeration for sufficiently low trade costs.