Introduction

The importance of space as the fundamental concept underlying the essence of regional science is unquestioned. Since the early growth of the field in the late 1950s, a large number of spatial theories and operational models have been developed which have gradually disseminated into the practice of urban and regional policy and analysis. However, this theoretical contribution has not been matched by a similar advance in the methodology for the econometric analysis of data observed in space, i.e., for cross—sections of regions at one or more points in time.