要旨：In the early 20th century, the British Empire primarily governed South Asia, and these regions shared similar administrations, institutions and commercial practices. After the Second World War, decolonization in South Asia became evident through the partition of India and countries gaining independence. These subsequent events can be seen as regional disintegration, and they offer a potential scope for examining the impacts of such institutional changes on maritime transport networks. By examining a new database detailing vessel movement between South Asian ports and the rest of the world from 1890 to 2000, we explore how maritime transport networks evolved in South Asia. Specifically, we compare the trends of shipping routes among ports before and after 1947. Applying the methodology developed by Redding, Sturm, and Wolf (2011) and Xu and Itoh (2017), we show that regional disintegration clearly lowered vessel movements for the routes that became international after 1947. Additionally, we examine two points; relationship with UK, and the independence of Bangladesh. For most of the cases, we find significantly negative impacts on vessel movements directly affected by regional disintegration.

要旨：This paper aims to theoretically and empirically investigate the relationship between agglomeration and urban industrial upgrading. If the high-tech industries relied on skilled labor, R&D, and specialized services more intensively, and the major channels of agglomeration economies were labor pooling, knowledge spillovers, and sharing the specialized local services, then urban agglomerations will gain comparative advantage and relatively specialize in the production of high-tech goods. Based on the urban industrial grade index developed in this paper, the association between agglomeration and urban industrial upgrading is confirmed by a panel regression using the data of Japan cities.

要旨：I propose a model with multiple cities that allows inter-city interactions through costly trade, internal migrations, and firm relocation. The model features multiple sectors, heterogeneous firms, and heterogeneous workers. The comparative statics of the model focuses on three shocks: falling transport costs, declining education costs, and increasing high-skill intensities. I show that: (1) there is a non-monotonic relationship between transport costs and the spatial income inequality; (2) a structural transformation triggered by declining education costs reduces the inequality, (3) the one due to a skill-biased technological change, however, predicts the opposite. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by a panel regression using the data from 32 countries with 1,962 regions.