2026 is the 20th anniversary of the first issue of Spatial Economic Analysis being published. To mark this occasion, the journal has published a special issue looking back at two decades of research and forward to the questions that matter most right now.
When Spatial Economic Analysis (SEA) published its first issue in 2006, globalisation was at its peak. Supply chains circled the globe without much friction. China had recently joined the WTO, and there was cautious optimism about what the knowledge economy could do for left-behind regions. It felt, briefly, like the spatial economics of trade and cities was a fairly settled science.
Twenty years on, things look rather different. The global financial crisis, COVID-19, geopolitical disruption, and the arrival of AI in everyday working life have all reshaped how we think about where people live and work. Spatial economics has had to keep up.
The Special Issue brings together new research on the themes that define the field today. The freely accessible editorial offers a readable overview of how the discipline has evolved and what it’s grappling with now.
Read the Special Issue Editorial here: 20 years of Spatial Economic Analysis: evolution, achievements and perspectives on the field
By the Editorial Board: Ugo Fratesi, Maria Abreu, Steven Bond-Smith, Luisa Corrado, Jan Ditzen, Daniel Felsenstein, Franz Fuerst, Carolin Ioramashvili, Orsa Kekezi, Katarzyna Kopczewska, Vassilis Monastiriotis, Gianfranco Piras, Francesco Quatraro, Francesco Ravazzolo, Shuai Shi, Emmanouil Tranos, Dimitrios Tsiotas, Danlin Yu & Jihai Yu.
Spatial Economic Analysis, Volume 21, Issue 1 (2026) (Special Issue)
Why size really doesn’t matter: from megacity myths to place-sensitive prosperity (open access)
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose
André Carrascal-Incera & Geoffrey J. D. Hewings
Mind the gap and the map: measuring distributional and spatial income polarisation
Sergio J. Rey
Chasing opportunity: spillovers and drivers of US state population growth (open access)
Sebastian Kripfganz & Vasilis Sarafidis
Philip McCann & Raquel Ortega-Argilés
Old, new, borrowed and BLUE: the twenty-first century spatial economic analysis toolkit
Rachel Franklin, Devika Jain & Zifu Wang
Causality in spatial economic analysis: with reference to the London Green Belt and house prices (open access)
Bernard Fingleton
Mathematical modelling of urban sprawl
Marc Barthelemy & Ulysse Marquis
Reshoring in a regional perspective: a research agenda
Roberta Capello
Digital network centrality and the structure of goods trade
Gianmarco Ottaviano