Diego Puga and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose awarded ERC support for interdisciplinary research in economic geography

The prestigious ERC Advanced Grants scheme is based exclusively on scientific excellence and encourages exceptional established scientists and scholars to pursue frontier research in their fields of expertise. Diego Puga and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose have been awarded in the still rare category of interdisciplinary grants which reward a combination of complementary expertise in rather different scientific areas in order to enable the realization of unconventional methodological approaches beyond established disciplinary boundaries.

Profs. Puga and Rodríguez-Pose’s research program is entitled Spatial spikes: bridging geography and economics to study distance, agglomeration, and policy (SPIKES). It seeks to promote the collaboration between economics and geography in order to unearth the factors determining why economic activity agglomerates in certain territories and not in others. The program aims at bridging the gap between the contrasting approaches of geographers and economists, by combining concepts and methods developed by economic geographers and geographical economists in order to better understand how economic agglomeration emerges and how the interaction among distant agglomerations contributes to reinforce, rather than weaken, their importance. The research will also elaborate on the adequate policy-mix which could be applied in order to optimize policy intervention in diverse geographical context and time settings.

Commenting on the award, Diego Puga said “It is a great honour to have received this prestigious scientific recognition. I very much look forward to collaborating with Andrés in addressing why economists and geographers, despite using very different methods, reach the conclusion that the world is becoming more ‘spiky’ and increasingly dominated by large metropoli”. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, on his part, stated “I feel privileged to be part of this interdisciplinary research agenda bringing together geographers and economists in order to better understand why, in a world where geographical barriers are collapsing, economic activity remains stubbornly concentrated in a limited number of dynamic poles”.