On the drivers of UK direct investment in the Spanish regions: A spatial Durbin approach

This paper empirically examines the key factors driving UK direct investment in the Spanish regions over the period 2000–2016 and, consequently, tries to unveil its main motivation. Applying a spatial Durbin panel model to capture spatial linkages, the results point to the existence of complementarity between the FDI received by a region and that of the remaining ones. This outcome, along with a positive and statistically significant spillover effect of market potential, reveals that complex-vertical FDI motivation with agglomeration economies prevails among UK MNEs investing in Spain. Additionally, our findings unveil the role played by some other FDI drivers, such as wages and infrastructure. Furthermore, the paper is unique in decomposing the average direct and spillover effects by region and pairs of regions, so that remarkable differences can be identified. This breakdown has strong significance from a policy perspective since it can guide regional policy makers. In short, our findings point out to the fact that FDI policy should be jointly designed by those regions presenting strong bilateral spillover effects. Thus, greater cooperation among policy makers would be welcome.     

The geography of the wages: Chinese cities 1989 and 1997

Improving national average income and reducing regional income inequality often serve as dual goals of economic development in a country. After over twenty years of economic reforms, China has been fairly successful in achieving the first goal, but failed in the second. This paper uses recent data with a sharper resolution to examine the variation of average wages across Chinese cities 1989–1997. Widening wage inequalities across cities are observed during the period. This research also seeks to explain the variation of wages between cities by factors such as agglomeration (density and city size), location advantages (distances from central cities and from the coastline), educational attainment, industrial structure and administrative hierarchy. Many of the factors are found to be important in explaining wage differences in Western countries but are yet to be tested in China. Some factors such as distance from the coast, industrial structure and administrative hierarchy are considered because of China’s unique social and economic systems.     

The Returns to Migration: The Influence of Education and Migration Type

We show the impact of migration type on real wages over time. We create a migration and earnings history from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth over the period 1979–2002. We estimate the effects of primary, onward, and two types of return migration on real wages using a panel data model with individual, location, and time fixed effects. Panel data are well suited for the study of the returns to U.S. internal migration because the influence of migration on wages has been found to occur years after the event. We differentiate return migration into two types: return to a location with ties that form a geographical anchor (“home”) and return to a prior place of work. We find that real wage growth varies by migration type. Education attainment is a significant factor in real wage growth. Our results show that onward migration is an important channel by which the monetary rewards to a college education are manifested.     

Exporting,Foreign Direct Investment,and Wages: Evidence from the Canadian Manufacturing Sector

Do exporters and foreign‐controlled establishments pay their workers higher wages than non‐exporters and domestic‐controlled establishments? This paper draws on an employer–employee data set to explore the existence of exporter and foreign‐owned wage premiums in the Canadian manufacturing sector. Results from wage regression models reveal that, on the whole, exporters and foreign‐controlled plants do pay higher wages than non‐exporters and domestic‐controlled plants. These results hold even after controlling for other plant and worker characteristics, although the wage differentials are substantially smaller. Furthermore, while the impact of foreign ownership on wages is found to be widespread across industries and regions, that of exporting is not. At the industry level, the wage effects of export‐market participation are strongest for workers in plants belonging to scale‐based industries; regionally, they are strongest in Quebec and British Columbia.     

The role of job uncertainty in inter‐regional commuting: The case of Italy

This paper studies the evolution of the determinants of inter‐regional commuting in Italy in the period 1992–2016, during which the labour market has been significantly reformed. To capture the changes in commuting patterns, the analysis of the role of individual, job, firm, and regional characteristics is performed. Specifically, the focus is on the impact of job uncertainty at both micro and macro level, through the analysis of the way the diffusion of temporary contracts has affected the decision to commute for work. The findings suggest that in more recent years workers hired on a temporary contract are more likely to commute to another region. Moreover, the higher the relative share of temporary contracts in the region of residence, the higher the probability of commuting across regions. These findings support the idea that the strong utilisation of (short) temporary contracts represents a push factor, which drives workers away in search of better job opportunities, with potentially negative consequences for poorly performing regions.     

Search Theory and Commuting Behavior

ABSTRACT This paper argues that search theory is a useful addition to the way economists and geographers have approached the study of commuting behavior. This is illustrated by showing that introduction of a spatial element into the standard model of job search leads to the prediction of critical isochrones. Moreover, in the context of an urban economy with decentralized employment, the spatial search model predicts excess commuting. Search theory also suggests that regression toward the mean may play a confusing role in data describing the development of commutes over time, such as has been used in recent empirical work. Finally, the paper develops a simple spatial equilibrium search model in which employers set their wages optimally and searchers determine their reservation wages optimally in mutually consistent ways. The spatial element is crucial for the existence of such an equilibrium in which reservation wages of all searchers and wages set by all employers are identical.     

Labor Density and Wages in Spain: Evidence from Geographically Disaggregated Data

In this paper, Ciccone's ( 2002 ) approach is applied to the Spanish case in 2011 but by estimating it using local labor markets (LLMs) instead of NUTS‐2 or NUTS‐3 regions. It is especially relevant in the case of Spain because the NUTS‐3 (provinces) are large regions in comparison with other cases in Europe. From a sample of income taxpayers published by the Spanish Fiscal Studies Institute, we derive figures on average wages by worker on the scale of LLMs. We argue that working at this level of spatial disaggregation is more in line with the idea of externalities from agglomerations, which are generated on a local scale. We can also observe intra‐regional heterogeneity and how the urban wage premium changes along the entire distribution of cities, including small‐medium size urban areas or rural areas. The empirical analysis is based on several estimation strategies, namely, ordinary least squares, two‐stages least squares, quantile regressions (QR), and instrumental variable quantile regressions (IVQR) estimators; they all find a significantly positive effect of agglomeration in the conditional mean of wages. This result can be estimated along the conditional distribution of wages. According to the QR and IVQR estimates, important variations are found along the distribution.     

Model of Regional Innovation Networks'' Overflows Influencing Common-technology Investment

The state of the commonness technique investment in the Regional Innovation Networks (RIN) directly decides the whole Regional Innovation ability. In order to analyze the characteristics of the commonness technique investment made by the manufacturers in the RIN, this article establishes an investment model in the RIN. After analyzing the model, this article puts forward a new conclusion that under the entire market investment mechanism, RIN can reduce the commonness technique investment level in the region,which makes the gap of the region with the RIN in the aspect of the commonness technique investment bigger than the gap of the region without the RIN, and the whole practical effect of the commonness technique is much greater in the regions with RIN.     

黑龙江农民工工资问题研究——以哈尔滨市呼兰区为例

2004年以来各地相继出现了农民工用工短缺的局面。在影响农民进城务工的诸多因素中,工资收入起着决定性作用。本文针对农民工工资问题,对呼兰区农民工工资现状及工资期望值进行调查研究。发现呼兰区农民工的工资存在的主要问题是平均工资水平低于当地社会平均工资;工作时间过长,工资被变相压低以及劳动回报率低。针对存在问题,结合最低工资标准提出了几点建议：企业应参考农民工工资期望,提高工资标准;地方政府应加强对农民工的技能培训。     

中国各地区“以工补农”的经济结构特征 分析与政策建议

当前中国总体上已进入工业化中期阶段,但由于地区发展不平衡,各地区不可能都进入工业化中期阶段,统一的“以工补农”政策模式和措施在各个地区也不一定都适用。作者采用美国经济学家钱纳里与赛尔昆设计的标准模型,构建了当前全国及各地区“以工补农”的经济结构特征评价指标,对中国各地区当前的经济结构特征作了初步的分析,得出了在中国总体上跨入工业化中期阶段的事实中,有8个省与中国总体进入工业化中期阶段的判断一致;仍有17个省、区、市尚未进入“以工补农”政策转折期;有6个省市明显超越全国平均水平,已基本进入大规模反哺期的结论,并提出了相应的政策建议。     

Rate control using the rate-distortion properties of the foreground and background regions

In order to improve the rate control performance of video encoder, video frames are segmented into two regions according to the video content, i.e. the foreground region containing the main moving objects and the background region containing the relatively static scene. The rate-distortion properties of the two regions are analyzed. Based on the analyses, a novel region-based macroblock layer rate control method for H.264/AVC is proposed. For the bit allocation process, more target bits can be assigned to the important macroblocks by employing an adaptive factor determined by the region information. Then, the quantization parameter (QP) is computed by using the quadratic model with different parameters related to the two regions. The computed QP is further adjusted to suppress the coding quality fluctuation between the two regions, as well as the quality fluctuation among the consecutive macroblocks. Finally, the rate control parameters are updated after coding the current macroblock. Experimental results demonstrate the mismatches between the actual coding bit-rates and the target bit-rates are reduced, while the coding performance of the encoder and the subjective visual quality of the reconstructed video are improved.     

Integrated crop–livestock systems in the Brazilian subtropics

In the subtropical region of Brazil, integrated crop–livestock systems (ICLSs) are characterized by the annual rotation of pastures and crops in a no-till system where the pasture component is used to produce either meat or milk. These systems focus on integration within the farm rather than between farms, being characterized by alternating cropping and pasturing in the same area. Independent of the crop rotations possible in a subtropical environment, the main integrated farming system found was rotation or succession of summer crops (Glycine max, Zea mays, Phaseolus vulgaris or Oryza sativa) with winter annual grazing grasses (mixed or solely Avena strigosa and Lolium multiflorum) or successive natural pastures.The high variability of crop yield in the Brazilian subtropics (due to climate extremes) as well as associated high costs and low prices has encouraged farmers to integrate livestock into their enterprises as a low-risk diversification option. Long-term experiments have demonstrated the benefits of crop–livestock integration with respect to many aspects of the soil–plant–animal system. There is evidence that such a system is not only a livestock–agriculture combination but also a unique system reaching a new complexity threshold, resulting in emergent properties with novel functionalities, some of which have yet to be investigated. In addition to greater environmental gains with less vulnerability, there are higher yields and more financial gain by the farmer, compared to that in the use of monocultures or non-integrated livestock farming. We conclude that ICLSs in Subtropical Brazil provide the opportunity for intensification with sustainability.     

The Analysis of Interrelations Between Regional Economic Growth and Savings

The interrelations between the regional economic growth and savings are analyzed by using Johansen cointegration test and Granger causality test based on error correction model. The results show that the economic growing is one of the main factors that raise the amount of saving but don't increase the saving growth rate in all three regions. Also the increase of saving could result in the eastern and weatern region's economic growth to some extent, but it does't affect the central region's economic growth. Therefore, some actions which drive the economic growth have to be taken in order to raise the saving, and the increase of the saving scale have to be controled to improve the regional economic growth.     

Effectiveness of selection at CIMMYT's main maize breeding sites in Mexico for performance at sites in Africa and vice versa

The exchange of elite breeding materials across regions is an important way in which multinational maize breeding programmes access new genetic variation, improve efficiency and reduce costs. Our objectives were to examine whether CIMMYT's breeding programmes for tropical and subtropical environments in Mexico and Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) can effectively share materials. Sets of selected and unselected lines were evaluated for per se and testcross performance in multiple environments in Mexico and ESA for grain yield, days to anthesis and plant height. Genotypic correlations between performance in Mexico and ESA as testcross and line per se were high (≥ 0.72) for all experiments, and indirect selection efficiency ranged from 67 to over 100% for all traits. Lines selected in ESA or Latin America performed equally well in each region, indicating selection was for broad rather than regional adaptation. Thus, breeding programmes of CIMMYT in both Mexico and ESA can benefit tremendously by exchanging breeding materials and test results, and elite selections from each region should be fast‐tracked for evaluation in the other.     

QTL analysis for soil‐surface roots originating from a New Plant Type rice (Oryza sativa L.)

The introgression line YTH16 harbouring chromosome segments from the New Plant Type cultivar IR65600–87–2‐2–3 with genetic background of an Indica Group rice IR 64 forms soil‐surface roots. To clarify the genetic mechanism, QTL analysis was performed using hybrid populations derived from a cross between IR 64 and YTH16. A total of eight QTLs were detected in the three introgressed segments on chromosomes 2, 5 and 7. Seven chromosome segment lines (CSLs) combining these three QTL regions were selected from the progenies. The two CSLs harbouring a single region (excluding the CSL with a region on chromosome 5) showed high scores and low means of root angle distribution in comparison with IR 64. Four CSLs harbouring two or three regions showed high scores and low means of root angle distribution in comparison with YTH16 and the CSLs harbouring a single QTL region. These results indicated that the soil‐surface rooting of YTH16 was controlled by the three QTLs’ regions and that chr. 5 particularly played a role in supporting the effect with others.     

Weighted spatial dynamic shift-share model as a forecasting tool for a regional economy: The case of South Korea

This study proposes a weighted spatial dynamic shift-share model that considers two regional attributes, namely, interregional interactions and regional receptive capabilities for domestic and international economic change, to improve the forecasting capability of the traditional shift-share model. In particular, the spatial dependence among regions is embodied by a spatial weight matrix based on contiguity. Additionally, regional receptive capabilities are represented by weights imposed on regional industries. Forecasts over the period of 2014–2016 are made for 14 regions in South Korea using the proposed model. The results are compared with actual data from the same period and evaluated in terms of the mean absolute percentage error. The results indicate that the proposed model is more reliable and accurate than the traditional model and other dynamic extensions.     

The persistence of inter‐regional hierarchy in technology transfer networks: An analysis of Chinese patent licensing data

This paper asks whether the technological development of a nation reduces the inter‐regional hierarchy in knowledge flow. We examine two scenarios that are the alternative to each other. The first is what we call the globalization of regional innovation system/weakening of inter‐regional hierarchy scenario: As many regions develop their niches in the global economy, the national “anchor” region loses its relative importance as the importer and distributor of new knowledge, rendering the domestic inter‐regional hierarchy less significant as a result. The second scenario is the globalization of national innovation system/persistence of inter‐regional hierarchy. The nation’s traditional anchor region becomes even more active in importing technology and distributing it to other regions of the country. To test which scenario is closer to reality, we employ social network metrics to analyse inter‐regional technology diffusion networks using Chinese patent licensing data for the 1998–2013 period. Our findings support the second scenario, showing that the influence of the traditional anchor region persists in the hierarchical network structure as new cities enter the network. We found five anchor regions: the three usual suspects—Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen—plus two that were slightly less expected—Dongguan and Suzhou.     

Does Public Lands Policy Affect Local Wage Growth?

The effects on wage growth of management practices applied on public lands in the Northern Forest region of the United States are quantified. A central objective is to determine if the management of public lands for preservationist uses results in lower average wages. This is a frequent claim made by critics of land preservation who argue that preservationist management, by prohibiting resource extraction, causes the composition of employment to shift from high‐wage jobs in resource‐based manufacturing to low‐wage jobs in the service sector. A model of simultaneous employment and net migration growth is estimated with data on non‐metropolitan counties over the period 1990 to 1999 and applied in a recursive relationship to wage growth. In earlier studies, models of this type have typically been specified in levels. Time‐series evidence that supports a preference for growth rates is provided as the form for such models. Exogenous variables in this model include the 1990 shares of the county land base that are publicly owned and managed for preservationist (non‐extractive) uses and multiple (including extractive) uses. It was found that wage growth rates are not significantly affected by the shares of land under either management regime. As well, recent declines in national forest timber sales are found to have no effect on wage growth.     

Racial Wage Differences among Young Male Job Changers: The Relative Contribution of Migration,Occupation Change,Site Characteristics,and Human Capital

ABSTRACT We demonstrated racial differences in the relationship between migration, location, and predicted wages for young male workers who have changed employers. An Oaxaca decomposition allowed a measuring of the contributions of migration, occupation change, site features, and human capital to the racial wage gap. Migration decreases black–white wage differences, and wage compensation for site attributes favors white householders. Constraints on occupation choice and migration dampen the ability of blacks to improve wages. Because most job changes occur in the first ten years of a career, these results on young workers give important general insights into the origins and persistence of racial wage gaps.     

European Regional Convergence Revisited: A Weighted Least Squares Approach

A plethora of past studies have concluded that unconditional β‐convergence is present in a broad sample of regions, implying that poor regions grow faster than rich ones. All these econometric studies tend to overlook the relative importance or size of each region in the national setting, treating all regional observations as equal. However, this assumption might lead to unrealistic or misleading results. Convergence analysis could be more meaningful if it included a weighting mechanism taking into account the size of regions. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the inclusion of a weighting mechanism in β‐convergence analysis, giving more weight to larger regions and less to smaller ones, can result in sharply different implications for the regional convergence‐divergence process. For this reason, both unweighted ordinary least squares (OLS) and weighted least squares estimators are used in the analysis of regional (intra‐national) convergence within 10 European Union (EU) countries over the period 1990–2000. The comparison between the two methods reveals that when regions are appropriately weighted for their size, intra‐national divergence, rather than convergence found with the OLS approach, seems to be the dominant experience in the EU.