Method of Gradual Advance for Town Development

The economical construction and development of China can't be separated from the development of rural economy.Due to appearance and development of rural enterprises,surplus labor force of rural areas was accepted, agricultural economy had been developed and farmers' income enhanced. The traditional agriculture had been reconstructed. The construction and development of small cities and towns are connected with the development of rural economy and accelerate the development of city economy. The construction of small cities and towns can have congregation effect and scale benefit. The industry structure of country will be optimized in whole, management cost will be cut down, energy consumption will be reduced, pollution will be lowered and labor productivity will be increased. In this paper, the importance of town construction in economic development of China is elaborated. The achievement and problem in town construction are summarized. A method of gradual advance for town development is put forward and the problems that must be handled in town development are pointed out.     

The impact of external knowledge sourcing on innovation outcomes in rural and urban businesses in the U.S.

This paper examines the relationship between external knowledge sourcing and a diverse set of innovation outcomes in rural and urban establishments in the U.S. Existing studies in the broader knowledge management literature principally examine firms in a single industry, overwhelmingly rely on patent data to proxy for innovation, and cannot account for the innovations of businesses in rural American markets. By addressing these limitations using data from the 2014 Rural Establishment Innovation Survey of the USDA's Economic Research Service, this research provides novel insights into how externally acquired knowledge by American establishments may support innovation. Results of the analysis suggest that external knowledge sourcing may specifically promote product, process, and green innovation in U.S. firms. While collective results when external sources of information are divided by industry orientation fail to show that sources outside of a firm's industry play a dominant role in the innovation processes of American establishments in general, findings provide evidence for an outsized impact of these relationships within rural establishments specifically and suggest that external knowledge sourcing from extra‐industry organizations is most critical for promoting successful innovation in rural firms. Results additionally indicate that knowledge sourcing from non‐local organizations may be more important for supporting innovation in rural compared to urban markets.     

Innovation in the periphery: Compensation and exploitation strategies

Recent research has challenged the urban bias in economic geography and innovation studies, showing that highly innovative and competitive firms are also located in peripheral regions. So far, however, analyses has focused on how firms innovate despite their unfavourable location and little has been said about the innovation benefits of peripheral areas. Hence, this article identifies different compensation and exploitation strategies adopted by firms in order to overcome regional innovation constraints and to reap innovation benefits found in the periphery. Drawing on 20 in‐depth qualitative interviews with innovative firms situated in the Austrian periphery, our analysis reveals that innovation in peripheral regions is the outcome of a combination of compensation and exploitation practices. The uptake and composition of these strategies depend on the firm and regional characteristics, with firm size being the most influential factor.     

Update Planning and Design Concepts of Taiping Old Downtown Areas in Shuangliu

China has witnessed unprecedented rapid and massive urbanization in recent years, and the urbanization has infl uenced almost all corners of the country, which is a natural process and necessary result of the social and economic development. Development and expansion of cities has been the keynote of the contemporary era. Meanwhile, existence and future development of traditional urban areas that have gone through the long-term natural development have been faced with serious crisis. This paper focused on the relative constancy and changeability of major elements in the natural evolution of traditional cities and towns, so as to explore an organic development mechanism, and make a daring attempt in update planning of old downtown areas of Taiping Town in Shuangliu County. On this basis, the paper aims at exploring a new development concept for common cities and towns that balances inheritance and innovation.     

World cities and peripheral development: The interplay of gateways and subordinate places in Argentina and Ghana’s upstream oil and gas sector

Serving as “gateways”, some world cities tie their wider hinterlands to global networks. The article revisits gateway–hinterland relations against the backdrop of assessments that lead to opposed conclusions on the benefits and shortcomings of integration into the world economy. Referring to the oil and gas sector in Argentina and Ghana, it answers the question of how gateways interact with subordinate places and also uncovers obstacles to peripheral development. The author finds that Accra and Buenos Aires concentrate corporate control. Argentina's capital serves as a gateway for knowledge generation and logistics too. Opportunities for peripheral development in both countries are considerable, albeit largely limited to generic services. Besides a certain concentration of business activities in the gateway cities, more important challenges to peripheral development are typical for small and medium enterprises (insufficient finance and management capabilities, unawareness of business opportunities, and the like). They include rent seeking and subcontracting. The latter leaves local companies in a particularly weak position vis‐à‐vis lead firms. The author argues that while integration into the world economy allows for peripheral development, the corresponding outcomes may not meet everyone's expectations. Related expectations must, therefore, be more down‐to‐earth than overly optimistic statements frequently made by politicians.     

Logistics Services: Global Functions and Global Cities

The services that organise global and regional trade are supplied by multi‐locational, multi‐functional, and information‐intensive firms. However, in much of the urban and regional research these firms are still seen as part of the transportation task, so their urban and regional impacts are expected to be expressed in concentrations of transportation infrastructure. This paper shows that there has been considerable functional and structural change within these services. In effect, they act like producer services and, for many, head offices and regional offices are in global cities, not all of which are major transportation centres. Using data on the location of the head and regional offices of a sample of the largest of these firms, this research shows that high‐ranked global cities, rather than large transportation centres, are a common office location although some firms operate from small cities. When these firms have regional offices overseas, all favour global cities. These results provide some insight on the links between these cities and the service tasks performed by service firms. They also provide grounds to develop a potentially rich research agenda based on analyses of the activities of these understudied firms.     

The structure and proximity mechanism of formal innovation networks: Evidence from Shanghai high‐tech ITISAs

The discussion on innovation networks of patents or papers has attracted many economic geographers; however, the Industrial Technology Innovation Strategy Alliance (ITISA) has been ignored, although it is also an important innovation form of firms, and the formation mechanism of alliance innovation networks is unclear. This study is based on the data of Shanghai high‐tech ITISAs between 2010 and 2015, and employs the methods of social networks and negative binomial regression to analyse the actor structure, spatial structure, and proximity mechanism of innovation networks of Shanghai high‐tech ITISAs. Results highlight the following: (a) Firms comprise the largest number of actors in alliance innovation networks, and universities, research institutions, and industry associations also play some roles. (b) The local and rooted characteristics of the innovation networks of ITISAs are obvious. The spatial distribution of innovation partners is mainly in Shanghai, and a few innovation actors are located in neighbouring cities, such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration. (c) Proximity significantly promotes the formation of innovation networks in an ITISA and contributes to the improvement of innovation ability, and organizational proximity plays a greater role than geographical proximity or cognitive proximity.     

Regional Social Inequalities and Social Deprivation in Guangdong Province,China

This article examines social deprivation at a regional scale using the case of Guangdong province, China. Counties, county‐level cities, and districts of prefecture cities are selected as the units of analysis. At the provincial level, a significant variation is found in terms of the social deprivation index, showing a pattern of increasing deprivation from the core of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to the peripheral areas of Guangdong province. In the PRD, social development conditions are significantly different among these units, whereas the level of economic development is less differentiated. Social deprivation in urban areas is considerably lower than in rural areas. The differences between cities are significant, showing a bifurcation trend, whereas rural areas seem to be similar. Social disparities in Guangdong province are derived from unequal economic growth as well as social and regional policies.     

Nothing is in the Air

It has often been argued that “there is something in the air” which makes firms in high‐density environments—such as cities or clusters—more innovative. The co‐location of firms facilitates the emergence of serendipity and casual encounters which promote innovation in firms. We assess this hypothesis using data from a survey of Norwegian firms engaged in innovation partnerships. The results indicate that there may be “much less in the air” than is generally assumed in the literature. The relationships conducive to innovation by Norwegian firms emerged as a consequence of purpose‐built searches and had little to do with chance, serendipity, or “being there.”     

The heterogeneity of agglomeration effect: Evidence from Chinese cities

Using annual surveys of industrial firms in China from 1998 to 2007, this paper applies the non‐linear least squares (NLS) method based on a grid search to analyse the effect of city size on firm total factor productivity (TFP). The results show that overall, the agglomeration effects in large cities, but not selection effects, significantly promote improvement in firm TFP. The optimal agglomeration scales of different industries differ as follows: those of capital‐ and technology‐intensive industries are larger than those of labour‐intensive industries. The agglomeration effects are also robust to different spatial areas without considering administrative boundaries. An inverted U‐shaped relationship exists between firm size and agglomeration effects, while the relationship between firm age and agglomeration effects is U‐shaped. State‐owned firms experience weaker agglomeration effects than non‐state‐owned firms. Cities higher in the administrative hierarchy and those with special economic zones have stronger agglomeration effects. However, cities higher in the administrative hierarchy and those with a larger economic development zone index can provide more resources to increase the survival rate of low‐productivity firms; thus, selection effects are not significant in Chinese cities.     

关于加快城乡融合发展推动乡村建设的思考

现阶段中国总体处于城镇化快速发展阶段,工农互促,城乡互补。但城乡收入和消费差距仍然较为悬殊,全员劳动生产率差距很大,农村基础设施依然薄弱,农村社会保障水平偏低。随着城镇化发展,一些村庄融入城镇,劳动力大量外出,一些村庄出现了空心化、老龄化问题,同时,随着重大工程实施等,一些村庄也出现了搬迁撤并等新的情况与问题。在乡村振兴的背景下,本研究结合欧洲乡村建设发展的情况和特点,针对国内乡村建设存在的问题,提出了统筹城乡发展空间,做有特色的乡村建设规划,培育新型农业经营主体,融合发展保持乡村活力等一些新的思考与建议。     

Location and the Innovation Performance of Commercial GIS Companies

This paper looks at the role of firm size, location, and in‐house research and development (R&D) in the innovation performance of U.S. firms in the commercial geographic information systems (GIS) industry. Data from a survey of 300 GIS firms are presented. The results suggest that innovation‐intensity varies directly with in‐house R&D spending (scaled as a proportion of company sales), but inversely with company size (total employment). Significant regional variations in the innovation performance of GIS firms are identified. It is argued that the geography of innovation is influenced by the spatial distribution of young and/or small firms, in that R&D‐productivity is found to vary inversely with company size. An important finding is that creative inputs to support innovation are almost evenly divided between internal and external sources. A surprising result is that the academic community is not viewed as a particularly important source of new ideas for innovative firms. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the survey data for future empirical work on the GIS sector.     

Reflections on the “Old” Economy, “New” Economy,and Services

ABSTRACT Economic competitiveness now has less to do with new materials than with new ways of producing, utilizing, and combining diverse knowledges. It is branded as symptomatic of a “new” economy and is often juxtaposed against the “old” economy. As accelerating technological change has greatly increased the volume and quality of the information available to organizations, to firms, and to individual employees, it is asserted that the economy has become more “new” than “old.” But this is predicated on the assumption that there is a “new” economy and that it is somehow distinguishable from the “old.” This paper explores the basis for this dichotomy and whether it really adds anything to understanding contemporary economies and their ongoing development. It will be argued that it is more useful and constructive to examine the economy through a lens dominated by service industries that are now the key drivers of change (innovation, competition, employment) and development. The paper is concluded with a discussion of some items that could usefully be part of an agenda for further research by economic geographers on the evolving spatial and structural attributes of service work and organizations and their impact on cities or regions at different scales of analysis.     

重庆农村新型股份合作社发育动因研究——基于重庆500户农户和100位基层干部的调查数据

为了探索出适合城乡统筹区域的新农村股份合作社,基于重庆市12个县(市、区)的500户农户和100位基层干部的随机抽样调查数据,从制度经济学的角度研究重庆农村新型股份合作社的发育动因。结果表明:(1)农业经济效益低下,城乡居民收入差距大是合作社制度创新的根本原因;(2)作为农业的最直接生产和经营者的农户,认为通过组建或参与农村新型股份合作社,能够给他们带来较高的并且稳定的收益,因此农户便很容易地自愿组成一个个的初级行动团体,共同追逐更多的外部利润;(3)样本区大多数基层干部认为农村新型股份合作社是促进资源整合、提升农业产业化经营水平、加快新农村建设的有效途径。由此可见,无论是初级行动团体还是次级行动团体都对农村新型股份合作社表现出积极的参与意愿,农村新型股份合作社这种制度创新必将发生。     

The geographically variegated connections of the Jakarta metropolitan area as produced by manufacturing firms

Connectivity in urban networks is often deemed to be an important feature of economically vibrant cities. Under conditions of contemporary globalization, the importance and geographies of these connections are increasingly variegated. Accordingly, various attempts have been made to analyse the external relations of cities and metropolitan regions, often through the lens of multilocational firms. Our purpose in this paper is to address the to‐date limited empirical knowledge about whether firms originating from different regions (i.e., firms with different headquarter [HQ] locations) create different patterns of inter‐urban relations. Drawing on the interlocking network model and using the Jakarta metropolitan area (JMA) as a case study, this paper explores how manufacturing firms with HQs either inside (further differentiating between the JMA and other cities) or outside (further differentiating between East Asian and non‐East Asian countries) Indonesia produce different patterns of external relations. Our findings indicate that each category of firms generates unique configurations of interurban relations for the JMA at the global and national scales. We argue that these variegated networks patterns not only reflect different locational strategies of firms, but also Indonesia's evolving policy orientations which have complex relations with evolving patterns of economic globalization.     

On the Pattern of Rural Human Settlement Environment Construction in Yunnan''s Mountain Region

The laggard status of rural human settlement environment of mountain region in Yunnan Province affected the balanced development between city and countryside, so accelerating its construction is the urgent need of rural development. In this paper, the characteristics and realistic influence of traditional pattern of rural human settlement environment construction in Yunnan mountain region are expounded. Moreover, it puts forward the construction pattern, which depends on the development of small towns by analyzing the connection among natural environment characteristics, society and economy innovation and the pattern of human settlement environment construction. At last, several advices are brought forward for the actual action of rural human settlement environment construction in future.     

Small–Scale Entrepreneurship and Access to Capital in Peripheral Locations: An Empirical Analysis

This paper presents an analysis of a public assistance program for small–scale entrepreneurship in peripheral areas. Public assistance compensates for market inefficiencies where the decision rules of financial institutions discriminate against otherwise viable small firms in capital markets. Lending institutions perceive high risk in providing debt capital when little information is present. Using empirical data from Israel, the determinants of this risk are estimated and the role of location in creating this information asymmetry is stressed. These results empirically establish that (1) location matters in determining the risk profile of the firm, (2) locationally targeted programs can reduce the information asymmetries that make peripheral firms unattractive to lenders, and (3) these programs can also generate positive welfare effects. Finally, there is speculation on the potential role of ICT (information and communications technology) in increasing the visibility of small firms in remote locations and creating a more symmetrical flow of information.     

Knowledge Networks in an Uncompetitive Region: SME Innovation and Growth

Knowledge networks are now recognised as a crucial element underlying the economic success and competitiveness of geographic locations, in particular regions. The aim of this paper is to assess the types of knowledge networks utilised and formed by knowledge‐based small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the relatively uncompetitive regional setting of Yorkshire and Humberside in the UK. It explores the relationship between knowledge networking activity and the levels of innovation and growth achieved by these SMEs. It is found that SMEs tend to utilise and value more knowledge networks with actors outside the region. However, more innovative SMEs possess a balance of inside and outside the region knowledge networks. Knowledge networking activity is sometimes negatively associated with growth, suggesting that networks with certain actors, such as public sector support agencies, may be formed by SMEs when they are facing competitive pressures. In terms of policy implications, the paper recommends a shift from the cluster policies implemented by many regional authorities to a regional innovation systems approach, focusing equally on the regional and more global dimensions of knowledge networks. It is concluded that regional public policy makers need to renew their efforts to support SMEs in creating and sustaining their knowledge networks.     

The Role of Pre‐Entry Experience of Firm Founders in Peripheral Regions: Routines,Business Contacts,and Local Starting Conditions

This paper investigates how spinoffs in peripheral regions can profit from the work experience of their founders. More specifically, it discusses which firm routines and business contacts entrepreneurs gather through their prior work experience, and how this experience influences the organizational structure and orientation of the newly founded firm. The transfer of capabilities from parent firm to spinoff has been identified as important aspect of industrial clustering, but empirical evidence from peripheral areas is still sparse. It compares 22 semi‐structured interviews with founders of manufacturing firms from different peripheral regions in Switzerland to investigate whether routine and network transfer differs in varying peripheral contexts. The results show that not only inherited routines are important, but also inherited business contacts. Further, instead of simply reproducing acquired routines and networks, founders employ a mixture of continuity and change to find a good trade‐off between relying on well‐proven practices and introducing novelty. Finally, the geographical proximity of inherited business contacts seems to have an influence on the implementation strategy founders choose. Entrepreneurs with strong inherited local business contacts do not have to invest as much in building up new business contacts as those entrepreneurs in more isolated locations.     

The Roles of Population,Place, and Institution in Student Diversity in American Higher Education

Student racial and ethnic diversity in higher education is an important and timely topic, as institutions, policy makers, and economists increasingly recognize the value that accrues at many levels of having a skilled and diverse student body and workforce. Students benefit from learning in a diverse environment; firms may benefit from a diverse workforce; and more demographically diverse regions may experience higher rates of economic growth. However, the forces governing institution‐level student diversity are poorly understood, as little prior research on the topic exists. This paper uses school enrollment data to parse out the contribution of institutional characteristics, geographical setting, and local demographic characteristics to student body diversity at each level of study. Results indicate that geographical location and local demographic composition play a role in student body diversity, as do the type and orientation of the institution. Institutional characteristics explain a lot of the variation in student body diversity and actual location of schools matters less than the demographic composition of young people around that location. Two broad conclusions emerge with regard to schools seeking to increase their student diversity. First, some may find their efforts hampered by circumstances outside their control (e.g., location). Second, the influence of public/private status and even school size suggests further research on the ways in which these factors influence student diversity so that eventual policy action can be more effective.