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This book applies regional analysis to the challenges facing global investment agencies seeking to enhance trade in lagging regions. It shows how spatial interaction and agent-based modelling can be used as the basis for developing new plans and policies. An in-depth analysis of trade routes is presented, which can be used to develop policies for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Landlocked Uganda and the sea-locked South Pacific Islands serve to illustrate the problems of covering sizable distances, accelerating export flows and improving supply chain efficiency. These examples also provide an excellent illustration of the power of regional science, from assembling data bases in difficult situations to developing and applying models of the trade system.

The focus of this book is the modeling of the location of economic activities, measured in terms of employment, in land-use and transportation systems. These measures are key inputs to models at intra-urban scales of the flows of persons and goods for both urban and transport planning. The models described here are either components of comprehensive models or specialist studies. Economic activities can be defined in terms of jobs or private-sector firms and public service organisations. Different levels of aggregation are used both in terms of organisational and geographical dimensions. In the case of firms and public organizations, a distinction can be made between the organizations themselves and corresponding establishments. For urban simulation models, it is the location of establishments that is important. At the more coarse levels of aggregation that are usually used in comprehensive models, firms and organizations are aggregated into sectors.

Mathematical models have long been used by geographers and regional scientists to explore the working of urban and regional systems, via a system where the equilibrium point changes slowly and smoothly as the parameters change slowly and smoothly. However, this all changed with the advent of catastrophe theory and bifurcation, which enabled the development of models where a quite sudden change in the position of the equilibrium point results from a slow, small, smooth change in one or more parameters.First published in 1981, this reissue of Professor Wilson's classic study outlines the implications of these mathematical models for geography and regional science, by way of a survey of contemporary applications.

First published in 1970, this groundbreaking investigation into Entropy in Urban and Regional Modelling provides an extensive and detailed insight into the entropy maximising method in the development of a whole class of urban and regional models.The book has its origins in work being carried out by the author in 1966, when he realised that the well-known gravity model could be derived on the basis of an analogy with statistical, rather than Newtonian, mechanics. Subsequent investigation demonstrated that the entropy maximising method stems from an even higher level of generality, and the beginning of the book is devoted to an account of its importance and use as a general modelling tool.This reissue will be welcomed by a range of students and professionals from fields as diverse as urban and regional studies, economics, geography, planning, civil engineering, mathematics and statistics.