Probabilistic Location Choice and Markovian Industrial Migration a Micro-Macro Composition Approach

The distribution of economic activity over a mutually exclusive and exhaustive categorical industry-region matrix is modeled as a composition of two random components: the probability-like share distribution of jobs and the dynamic evolution of absolute aggregates. The former describes the individual activity location choice by comparing the predicted profitability of the current industry-region pair against that of all other alternatives based on the available information on industry-specific, region specific, or activity specific attributes. The latter describes the time evolution of macro-level aggregates using a dynamic reduced from model. With the seperation of micro choice behavior and macro dynamic aggregate constraint, the usual independence and identicality assumptions become consistent with the activity share distribution, hence multi-regional industrial migration can be represented by a set of probability evolution equations in a conservative Markovian from. We call this a Micro-Macro Composition Approach since the product of the aggregate prediction and the predicted activity share distribution gives the predicted activity distribution gives the predicted activity distribution which explicitly considers the underlying individual choice behavior. The model can be applied to interesting practical problems such as the plant location choice of multinational enterprise, the government industrial ploicy to attract international firms, and the optimal tax-transfer mix to influence activity location choice. We consider the latter as an example.