We develop an economic geography model in which mobile skilled workers choose between working in the production sector or becoming part of an unproductive political elite. The elite sets tax rates on skilled and unskilled workers to maximize its own welfare by extracting rents, thereby influencing the spatial allocation of production and changing the available range of consumption goods. We show that such behavior increases the likelihood of agglomeration and of urban primacy. In equilibrium, the elite may tax the unskilled workers but will never tax the skilled workers, and there are rural-urban transfers towards the agglomeration. The size of the elite and the magnitude of the tax burden that falls on the unskilled is shown to decrease with product differentiation and, via the tax rates, with the expenditure share for manufacturing goods.
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Paper provided by Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in its series CORE Discussion Papers with number
2006114.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D58 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Computable and Other Applied General Equilibrium Models D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies R12 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
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