Cities,transport and agglomeration: Addressing the urban mobility challenges in India

Cities are the drivers of economic growth and structural transformation in developing countries. Transport makes or mars a city. It connects people to opportunity and business to prosperity. Urban transport acts as a catalyst of growth through direct, indirect and induced effects, including those linked to agglomeration and networking externalities. Yet policy makers and planners in developing countries like India continue to neglect the economics of urban public transport. Hardly has there been any attempt to study relationships between city externalities, spatial planning, public transport infrastructure, economic growth and value capture financing. This paper delves into these aspects and presents lessons from theory for the strategies of development and financing of urban public transport in India. It is focused on the implications of urban externalities for transit‐oriented development, transport land use integration, strategic densification of growth nodes and public transport financing based on a value creation, capture and recycling paradigm.     

Do Entrepreneurs Enhance Economic Growth in Lagging Regions?

Because support for entrepreneurship is often a core part of economic development strategies, we investigate whether it is important for growth in lagging, rural U.S. regions by focusing on Appalachia. While entrepreneurship has the advantage of being endogenous and “home grown,” previous research suggests that remote rural regions may lack the agglomeration economies to benefit greatly from entrepreneurship. Using county‐level data, we explore the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth, employing self‐employment and small business data as proxies for entrepreneurship. We look at the results for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) region, using its immediate Appalachian neighbors outside the ARC region as a control group. Moreover, we also account for self‐sorting by proprietors to locate in expanding regions. Despite strong barriers to growth in Appalachia, our empirical results suggest that self‐employment is positively associated with employment and income growth, and that efforts to promote entrepreneurial capacity may be among the few economic development strategies with positive payoffs in remote regions.     

Agglomeration of Services in American Metropolitan Areas

The growth of many service industries among American metropolitan areas stem from an eclectic set of forces. These include market penetration effects of increasing importance of services throughout the economy, agglomeration effects in immature and deregulated industries, and institutional and infrastructure constraints. These diverse forces are interpreted as urbanization and localization economies. A cycle of centralization of 27 fast growing service industries is documented for MS As in the period 1977-84. The two agglomeration effects are tested directly, using a power function model that relates employment and establishment growth to MSA size and initial level of employment in a local industry. Localization economies rather than the general advantages of metropolitan size best explain the growth patterns. This result implies that service industrial complexes are rapidly emerging in American metropolitan areas.     

Human Capital Stock and Flow and Economic Growth Analysis: Note

Human capital is becoming recognized as an increasingly important factor in rural economic development. Economic research, however, has not provided clear empirical support of the relationship between human capital investment and economic growth. This paper applies stock and flow concepts to human capital and suggests an operational approach for applying stock and flow concepts to the analysis of the impact of human capital investments through education on economic growth.     

The Influence of Agglomeration Externalities on Manufacturing Growth Within Indonesian Locations

Differences in agglomeration externalities and industrial regimes between locations generate performance differentials for their localized economic activities. For more than two decades, scholars have debated which externality is dominant for growth and under which regime. This study aims to resolve this debate by analyzing the influence of agglomeration economies on the growth of five‐digit manufacturing sectors and firms for Indonesian cities and regencies between 2000 and 2009. This is investigated employing the recent reconceptualization of variety based on sectoral linkages distinguishing related and unrelated varieties, which allow assessing their idiosyncratic economic roles. The findings support that economic relatedness is the dominant source for expansion of sectors and firms within Indonesian locations. Specialized clusters and competition are inversely related to manufacturing growth, although the latter fosters sectoral employment within Indonesian regencies. Population density and human capital show antithetic effects between cities and regencies due to their distinctive urbanization trajectories and industrial compositions.     

Growth Effects of Governmental Policies: A Comparative Analysis in a Multi‐Country Context

The potential interactions among governmental policies, investments andeconomic growth are complex and manifold. This paper will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the various economic insights that are currently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by a selective literature review) and empirically (by reviewing the empirically obtained insights). Despite the wide variety of potential theoretical relationshipsbetween government expenditures, taxation and growth, most empirical analyses are restricted to simple linear regressions of growth on some measure of government expenditures. We will indicate directions for future empirical research that may enrich our knowledge about the complex relationship between fiscal policies and economic growth, not only nationally but also regionally.     

Investigation of e‐commerce in China in a geographical perspective

In recent years, e‐commerce has become a phenomenal symbol for the ongoing socio‐economic transformation in China. Driven by the growth of the Internet and cyberspace, e‐commerce changes both the traditional patterns of economic transactions and the social relations embedded in social activities. E‐commerce is a new catalyst for economic growth in China as it reduces restrictions to market access and the costs of transaction. This research examines the geography of e‐commerce in China within a theoretical framework grounded by social theory and neoclassical economics. After presenting a background of the development of e‐commerce in China, the spatiality of e‐commerce and its correlation to socio‐economic variables are examined with both quantitative and geovisualization techniques. Results of this research address that the growth of e‐commerce in China presents a nationwide inequality constrained by local economic, politic, and infrastructure conditions. The growth of e‐commerce in China presents a hybrid feature in terms of spatiality, which relies on structures in both cyberspace and physical space. Policy implications and suggestions for future research were suggested based on these empirical results. A discussion of limitations associated with this research and a concluding note close the research.     

Does Public Infrastructure Affect Regional Performance?

Does public infrastructure affect state output? This paper uses both a Cobb-Douglas and a translog production function to examine the impact of public infrastructure spending on state output. Like labor and private capital, the stock of public capital is considered to be an input into the production process. The data are based on Alicia Munnell's work and were provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Unlike many of the earlier studies employing Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) techniques, this analysis employs estimating methods that take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data set. While these methods lend support to the public capitol hypothesis, there is evidence that studies relying on OLS have reported a coefficient on public capital that is upward biased. This paper, which controls for heterogeneity in the data, finds the coefficient on public capital to be smaller than that presented in previous studies. This finding has important policy implications. It indicates that while investment in public capital may have a positive impact on the private sector, this impact will be much smaller than predicted by previous studies.     

Air Passenger Transportation and Growth in the U.S. Urban System, 1950–1987

The relationship between transportation and urbanization at the national scale is revisited by focusing upon the role that air passenger transportation has played in the post-war evolution of the U.S. urban system. Theory suggests that major transportation innovations have exhibited profound and prolonged interdependencies with patterns of growth in national or regional urban systems. As the most recent major intercity transportation innovation, it should be expected that utilization of air transportation should bear some relationship to patterns of growth in urban places. This paper documents this relationship by using FAA and U.S. Census data to correlate volumes of air passenger flows per capita with changes in population and employment for the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The expectation that higher volumes of air passenger flow per capita exhibit a positive correlation with both previous and subsequent growth is confirmed by the analysis. More detailed examination of both high and low air passenger index cities suggests functional and regional consistencies with the central hypothesis. The implications of these results for air transportation and airport planning include at least some justification for increased attention to provision of air service and adequate airport infrastructure as well as reiteration of the importance of air transportation in economic development.     

From R&D to Innovation and Economic Growth in the EU

ABSTRACT Over the last two decades many European governments have pursued ambitious research and development (R&D) policies with the aim of fostering innovation and economic growth in peripheral regions of Europe. The question is whether these policies are paying off. Arguments such as the need to reach a minimum threshold of research, the existence of important distance decay effects in the diffusion of technological spillovers, the presence of increasing returns to scale in R&D investments, or the unavailability of the necessary socio‐economic conditions in these regions to generate innovation seem to cast doubts about the possible returns of these sort of policies. This paper addresses this question. A two‐step analysis is used in order to first identify the impact of R&D investment of the private, public, and higher education sectors on innovation (measured as the number of patent applications per million population). The influence of innovation and innovation growth on economic growth is then addressed. The results indicate that R&D investment, as a whole, and higher education R&D investment in peripheral regions of the EU, in particular, are positively associated with innovation. The existence and strength of this association are, however, contingent upon region‐specific socio‐economic characteristics, which affect the capacity of each region to transform R&D investment into innovation and, eventually, innovation into economic growth.     

The End of the Nuclear Era: Nuclear Decommissioning and Its Economic Impacts on U.S. Counties

Between 1957 and 1990, nearly 100 nuclear reactors were constructed throughout the U.S., and nuclear power currently accounts for 20 percent of electricity production nationwide. Nuclear plants are often constructed in small communities for which they constitute a large source of employment and income. To date, 24 nuclear reactors have undergone decommissioning, and more are expected in the future, particularly as nuclear reactors age and face increasingly strict regulations. This paper examines the effects of nuclear decommissioning over time at the county‐level on measures of employment, income, and population using difference‐in‐differences regression and propensity score matching. Panel data are obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, and cover the years 1975–2014. The analysis finds that nuclear decommissioning is associated with positive and statistically significant increases in employment and per capita income over time. Results suggest that nuclear decommissioning may actually be a positive force in regional economic development, and concludes with limitations of the approach and implications for future research. As an emerging area of research, this paper is meant to build on previous work, as well as to provide a basis for further discussion and debate on the economic future of nuclear host communities and regional economies.     

Changing Employment Profiles and Growth: An Economic Base Study of Florida Counties (1982–1987)

Location Quotients are used to estimate economic base multipliers for two-digit Standard Industrial Classification employment data at the county level for the state of Florida. Changes in multipliers are contrasted to changes in county employment profiles and demographic trends for the period 1982 to 1987. Counties are then classified by employment and growth characteristics. A cross-sectional econometric model is constructed to explain regional shifts in total employment. It is demonstrated that although the Florida economy is supported by a low level of employment activity in primary and secondary sectors (relative to the tertiary sector), these sectors tend to be very important in explaining variations in regional economic growth. The empirical findings suggest that the alleged service-oriented economy of Florida is still reliant upon export-oriented activity as the catalyst for employment expansion.     

Reversal of economic fortunes: Institutions and the changing ascendancy of Barcelona and Madrid as economic hubs

This paper looks at the divergent economic trajectories of Barcelona and Madrid since Spain's transition to democracy. It highlights how Barcelona, the city that was better positioned four decades ago to emerge as the main Spanish economic hub, has lost out to Madrid. We argue that the contrasting trajectories of the two cities have less to do with the pull of Madrid as the capital of Spain, with the development of new infrastructure in the country, or with agglomeration economies, and more with institutional factors. A growing societal divide in Barcelona along economic, social, and identity lines has led to a greater breakdown of trust and to the development of strong groups with limited capacity to bridge with one another than in Madrid. This has entailed the emergence of negative externalities that have limited the economic potential for growth in Barcelona and facilitated the rise of Madrid as the main economic hub within Spain.     

Agglomeration Economies and Employment Growth: New Evidence from the Information Technology Sector in Italy

This paper uses local labour market area (LLMA) data to investigate the dynamics of employment in the information technology (IT) sector in Italy between 2001 and 2005. The aim is to test if agglomeration forces might significantly affect local IT employment growth. The OLS results are broadly consistent with those of earlier studies. In particular, IT employment growth is enhanced by industrial diversity (Jacobs externalities) and by plant size (economies of scale). At the same time, LLMAs with higher IT concentrations are associated with lower employment growth rates. As a robustness check, quantile regression analysis is performed. This additional set of results reveals that the role of agglomeration forces is different across IT growth levels.     

The State‐Level Impacts of Enforcing Sales Taxes for E‐retail Purchases

The Marketplace Fairness Act (S. 743) recently passed by the U.S. Senate may portend a national move toward states imposing sales taxes for business‐to‐consumer e‐retail purchases. While much of the policy debate surrounding this question has focused on trade creation versus diversion, there are likely distinct compositional effects at the state level, which will affect both economic activity and tax revenue. Consumers are clearly hurt by an online sales tax. However, such a policy would seemingly benefit state tax coffers, as well as traditional brick‐and‐mortar retailers and their employees. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model approach to get a better understanding of the state‐level income, employment, and tax revenue effects of such a policy shift, in particular the likely tradeoffs between these three traditional economic targets across reasonable ranges of price elasticities.     

Road to shared prosperity: The elaboration and influence of a transboundary policy narrative for regional economic integration

In the Mekong Region, the Asian Development Bank and partners have promoted economic corridors as a way to achieve regional economic integration and growth. This study evaluates how a transboundary policy narrative of shared prosperity around the East–West Economic Corridor programme emerged, and then how it was elaborated and used, taking a set of border policies of the government of Thailand as cases. For two decades the shared prosperity narrative has been used by a coalition of elite actors to support a programme of investments in road infrastructure, as well as to push for agreements on trade, border logistics, investment and tourism. The shared prosperity narrative has helped maintain support for the programme despite its failures to meet projections and expectations. Although criticised by civil society and experts from time to time, no coherent shared counter‐narrative emerged. Policy elites in Thailand have used the transboundary narrative to justify investments in special economic zones, and transport infrastructure near the border and inside neighbouring countries. Thailand has also reproduced the narrative in support of efforts to bolster tourism cooperation, and negotiate cross‐border trade and logistics agreements. Roads and bridges have been built, underlining how discursive practices have material consequences and reinforce the narrative.     

Modelling Local and Regional Economic Development in Turkey: A “Curate's Egg”

This paper explores and unpacks the nature of the processes shaping regional economic growth in Turkey using an econometric modelling strategy. Existing empirical research in this field has focussed on regions in economically advanced and technologically innovative economies. As a consequence, the broader picture of the dynamics of regional development in less developed countries, particularly its social and political origins and the overall changes in regional inequality, has remained elusive and less clear. In this study, a set of econometric models is developed to explore the validity of a range of theoretical propositions in explaining the trajectories of regional economic change in Turkey between 2004 and 2008. Growth is calibrated in terms of employment and changing rates of unemployment in the chosen time period in the 81 provinces of Turkey. The results of the study explain that implications of the current local and regional economic development theories are a “Curate's Egg”—good in parts—because these theories are only partially relevant in the Turkish context.     

New Approaches to Spatial Economics

This paper looks at the linkages between three recent developments in spatial economics that in combination have changed the way that economic growth is viewed. These new approaches are that of the New Growth Theory, the measurement of geographical economic convergence, and the role of infrastructure in stimulating economic growth. In combination these developments may combine to provide a different perspective on why regions often grow at differential rates,ways of measuring these differences, and possible policy interventions tomanipulate geographical variations in the growth process. The paper argues, however, that these concepts, while they may offer new insights, are nevertheless unlikely to provide a complete picture of why spatial economic divergence is widespread nor a set of policy instruments that can be simplydeployed to ameliorate such discrepancies.     

兰州-白银经济区高新技术产业集聚与区域经济增长关系的实证分析

以兰州-白银经济区的高新技术产业为研究对象,依据2000—2011年的时间序列数据,采用区位熵指数对高新技术产业的集聚水平进行测度,并在此基础上,对高新技术产业的集聚与经济增长的关系进行协整及格兰杰因果检验,进而构造VAR模型并得到脉冲响应函数。实证结果表明：兰白经济区的高新技术产业已经形成了集聚且集聚度呈稳定增长的趋势,同时,高新技术产业的集聚与经济增长之间存在长期的均衡关系。最后分析得出兰白经济区的高新技术产业集聚是一种政府主导型的集聚模式,并提出了相应的政策建议。