Introduction to Bifurcation Analysis in Economic Geography

This chapter provides an overview of this book. We introduce various spatial platforms, such as two places, line segment, equidistant place, racetrack, and square and hexagonal lattices. We study spatial economic agglomerations on these platforms in economic geography (spatial economic) models. These models describe economic agglomerations in certain places through the migration of workers and firms between places due to economic incentives. This chapter introduces a multiregional formulation, the dynamics in typical economic geography models, and the associated essential concepts. A general mathematical framework for analyzing bifurcation behavior is presented. We overview group-theoretic bifurcation theory, which is a mathematical tool to tackle the bifurcation of symmetric spatial platforms.