Interregional Trade in Producer Services: Review and Synthesis

This paper reviews some of the past decade's studies of producer or intermediate-services exports from local regions. After a discussion of conceptual and methodological problems and inconsistencies, we present these studies according to the three basic methodologies: surveys, location quotients, and input-output. Overall, our sense is that these studies support limited but important conclusions: (1) If intermediate services are defined broadly, certain of these activities have as their major function interregional or international transfer or trade. By nature, these distributive services have widespread clients, and benefit from locations with substantial physical and communications infrastructure. (2) Among most business-and financial-service activities, most offices are established to serve a local region, but may derive some revenues from beyond this expected zone. (3) The exceptions—the activities and establishments that derive much of their revenue beyond such “normal” zones—are particularly specialized, particularly large, or parts of multiregional enterprises. (4) Such firms tend to locate in larger or more specialized urban places, probably because of the labor force, the corporate connections, and the rapid dissemination of ideas, contacts, and information within and among the largest metropolitan areas. These conclusions lead to some general policy recommendations.     

Producer Services and Flexible Production: An Exploratory Analysis

While the flexible production literature has become increasingly abundant in recent years, the vast majority of it is narrowly restricted to manufacturing activities, entirely ignoring the role that producer services play in modern systems of production. This paper attempts to explore the conceptual linkages between the growth and the location of producer services, on the one hand, and the rise of flexible forms of production, on the other. After a brief summary of the flexible production approach, the factors underlying the growth and the increasing externalization of producer services are examined. The appropriateness of employing a flexible production framework in the case of producer services, and the significance of flexible production for understanding the location of producer services are then explored. Finally, the labor force effect of flexibility in the production and use of producer services is considered.     

Producer Services Development and the Role of Telecommunications: A Case Study in Rural Washington

Information-intensive producer services, which constitute one of the fastest growing components of the U.S. economy, have been identified as a potential contributor to economic development in rural areas. This issue is examined in a case study of a community in rural Washington State. The findings indicate that producer services have not been decentralizing to rural Washington, and that opportunities for producer services development in rural communities are limited because of the inaccessibility of markets, smaller pools of skilled labor, and the lack of agglomeration economies. Opportunities for producer services are greatest in large rural communities with high-quality telecommunications systems. Although the quality of telecommunications systems is important to the economic health of communities, advances in telecommunications can be a two-way street for rural America. While telecommunications improvements increase a rural community's access to information and make it possible for rural businesses to more easily serve non-local markets, they can also make it easier for firms located in urban areas to serve rural markets via branch offices or through the telecommunications system.     

The Growth of Producer Services Industries: Sorting Through the Externalization Debate

The development of a theory for explaining why firms externalize producer services functions is critical to gaining a better understanding of why the producer services industries have enjoyed robust growth within the United States, Canada and the European Community. Scholars of the service economy have attempted to develop explanations for the externalization of producer services functions. These explanations constitute “the externalization debate” since there has been a lack of consistency and agreement as to how and why externalization is taking place. None of the explanations for externalization approach what could be termed a theory of producer services externalization, since they consist of empirical generalizations that are not deductively connected. This paper attempts to move one step toward the development of such a theory by constructing a more comprehensive and systematic conceptual approach to analyzing the extemalization of producer services functions. The motivating factors for externalization that are proposed in the externalization debate are systematically examined. The insights of the transaction cost and production subcontracting literatures are then discussed and the implications of these literatures for producer services externalization are examined. A synthesis of the insights provided by these research literatures is then used to develop a more comprehensive analytical framework for examining producer services extemalization.     

Impacts of IT Advances and E‐commerce on Transportation in Producer Services

ABSTRACT Producer services have been among the most rapidly growing industries, as measured by employment, in the United States and in Europe in recent decades. The production and delivery of these specialized forms of service industry work require the use of transportation and communications systems in a variety of ways, including the physical movement of people working in these industries, as well as the movement of the information related to the production and distribution of their work. Some of this work is performed in localized markets, requiring travel between clients and suppliers in local transportation modes, such as auto, bus, or other types of transportation. Other work is done by specialists who travel interregionally and globally to do their work, primarily traveling to their clients. There is little knowledge of how these production relationships have changed with the advent of the Internet and the widespread use of e‐mail in the business production process. Within the framework of this STELLA initiative, this paper outlines research needs in this area, and frames an approach that would produce badly needed knowledge about impacts on the producer services of the Internet and related e‐commerce initiatives on physical transportation systems at a local to interregional scale.     

生产性服务的发展与都市农业社会化服务体系的构建

农业生产性服务是为农业生产过程提供专业化、社会化服务的一种中间服务,是经济发展到一定阶段而出现的新兴业态。在现有文献研究的基础上,从生产性服务的定义入手,论述了农业生产性服务与农业社会化服务、农业现代服务等概念之间区别,阐述了生产性服务与农业发展的互动关系,并结合都市农业的功能特征,说明了都市农业具备先行发展农业生产性服务的条件,提出了构建可持续发展的都市农业生产性服务体系的政策建议。     

Producer Services,Labor Market Segmentation and Peripheral Regions: The Case of Saskatchewan

ABSTRACT Within the last decade, a considerable literature has emerged on the growth and location of producer services employment in North America, and in the role of labor market characteristics in shaping these changes. One of the outcomes of this research has been the realization that producer services are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan areas, and that there is a strong core-periphery dichotomy in the representation of these activities. This paper explores the labor market characteristics of a set of producer service activities within the peripheral urban hierarchy of Saskatchewan, Canada, dominated by the regional cores of Saskatoon and Regina, and surrounded by ten peripheral regions. The data set was provided by Employment Canada, and divided into Canada Employment Centre (CEC) Areas. It was found that the higher order producer services, such as Finance and Business Services, are significantly underrepresented relative to the rest of Canada, while others, such as Services to Primary Producers and Transportation and Communications, are significantly overrepresented. However, the nature of these services, as reflected in their labor market characteristics, are very different. Gender and the role of part-time labor appear to be distinguished on the basis of the specific producer service sector, with very few distinctions across space. On the other hand, differences in the roles played by part-year labor is less related to the sector and more related to position within the peripheral hierarchy. Although the heartland-hinterland model is usually applied at national or even international scales of analysis, the nature of the segmentation of the producer services labor force, and its relationship to urbanization and development of the sector, imply that the model can in fact be used as a fiamework for analyzing intraregional employment relationships within the periphery. This study highlights the nature of the labor force as one aspect of this framework.     

温度诱变选育透明质酸产生菌

以兽疫链球菌为出发菌种,从血琼脂平板上筛选出不具溶血性的突变菌,采用恒温、变温进行诱变处理,同时对各菌株进行发酵培养比较。结果表明,相对于原菌株,变温诱变菌株的透明质酸产量有显著提高,产量由1.99g/L提高到2.95g/L,增加率为48%。     

Growth of Incumbent Firms and Entrepreneurship in Vietnam

This paper analyzes the relationship between the performance of incumbent firms and the net entry of new firms by combining various theoretical views of entrepreneurship. Different regression models to treat dynamics and endogeneity issues are applied to test the research hypothesis with regional micro‐data for 61 Vietnamese provinces from 2000 to 2008. The main finding is that net entry is associated with the performance of incumbent firms and the overall performance of the economy. Incumbents' growth and gross domestic product growth induce changes in the existing production system and stimulate the creation of an economic environment more favourable to new firm formation. Consistent with the hypotheses put forward within the “knowledge spillover,” the “error‐correction,” and other approaches, incumbents may generate new entrepreneurial opportunities not only for themselves but also for the whole society.     

The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and Commodity Transportation Services among U.S. States

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) implemented beginning in 1989 by the United States aid Canada will have significant impacts on bilateral trading patterns. In addition to its long-term, investment-related repercussions, the FTA will affect the volume, commodity composition, and spatial distribution of trade and, consequently, the transportation services required to move commodities between the two nations. This paper examines the changing spatial structure of U.S.-Canadian trade under the FTA. It employs commodity-specific analyses of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, as well as price and income elasticities of demand, to estimate sectoral and special changes among U.S. states in total, land, water, and airborne commodity flows since 1988 attributable to the FTA. The analysis details the assumptions and methodology used, elaborates upon the likely consequences for me nation's ten largest customs districts, particularly New York, and concludes with some comments on other forces that may alter the expected results.     

关于加快发展河南农业生产性服务业的思考

阐述了河南省农业生产性服务业面临的发展机遇,指出了加快发展农业生产性服务业的总体要求,提出了加快发展农业生产性服务业的重点任务,以期促进河南省适度规模经营、推进农业供给侧结构性改革。     

Immigration and Ethnic Entrepreneurship: A Comparative Study in the United States

Using Singer's typology of different types of immigration gateways, this study mainly addresses how metropolitan area conditions impact ethnic labor force entrepreneurial choices across ethnicity and gender, within the contexts of different types of immigration gateways. Employing the 5 percent 2000 Integrated Public Usable Microdata Samples and a multilevel regression strategy, this study demonstrates that different types of immigration gateways have distinctive impacts on ethnic entrepreneurship. After controlling for both personal‐ and metropolitan‐level characteristics, it is found that whites and blacks are more likely to own businesses in newer immigration gateways, while Hispanics and Asians are more likely to do so in the more established gateways. In addition, differences as to the interaction effects of gender and regional labor markets are the most significant for blacks and Asians. Such interaction effects reshape gender differences in business ownership across ethnic groups.     

Motivations and Performance Conditions for Ethnic Entrepreneurship

Ethnic entrepreneurship has become a popular concept in a modern multi–cultural society. This paper seeks to offer an overview of the potential of ethnic entrepreneurship for solving inter alia the structural unemployment problems of ethnic groups in cities. There is a general lack of empirical evidence on this issue in the current literature. The present paper aims to fill this gap by addressing in particular the critical success conditions for ethnic entrepreneurs. The focus of the research is on variations in success across three ethnic groups in the Amsterdam area. By means of structured personal interviews with many ethnic entrepreneurs, a systematic qualitative data base was created. The paper sets out to identify empirically the driving forces for business success, such as education or the role of informal networks. The explanatory framework deployed for the identification of these qualitative success factors for distinct ethnic groups is based on a particular, recently developed artificial intelligence method, viz. rough set analysis. This multidimensional classification approach appears to be able to identify various important factors for the motivation and performance of ethnic enterprises. Two major findings emerge from this investigation: (i) performance conditions vary across ethnic groups, and (ii) informal networks are crucial for business success.     

中国小麦进口贸易格局及其影响因素研究——基于贸易引力模型

中国是小麦的净进口国,对国际市场的依赖性高,研究中国小麦进口的来源结构以及影响因素,对中国粮食安全问题至关重要。在1992—2017年小麦贸易的形势分析基础之上,利用引力模型对小麦的进口贸易的影响因素进行研究。结果表明:自2013年以来,中国小麦贸易量处于平稳状态,逐步形成了以澳大利亚为主,美国加拿大和哈萨克斯坦为辅的进口格局;中国小麦进口结构趋于优化,与哈萨克斯坦、以色列等一带一路沿线国家的小麦贸易增速较快;地理距离、是否沿海、是否加入APEC、出口国当年GDP和上年粮食产量对中国小麦进口有显著影响。最后,还提出了相应的对策建议。     

Multisited Versus Compact Producer Service Firms: Insights from the French Case

Much of the literature on the location of producer services is concerned with their uneven spatial development across regions. Although this approach is useful, it proves to be limited, and a complementary analytical framework is required. This paper uses data from France's Annual Survey of Services to address producer service location from a novel perspective, that of the firm. A basic distinction is made between single site (compact) and multisite (network) producer service firms, and the natures of these two types are analyzed in terms of business strategies, location and performance. Further analyses are then based upon the distinctions between sales and servuction networks, and between specialized and diversified networks. Although significant for producing higher output levels, a network structure does not necessarily ensure a higher level of profitability.     

借鉴国际公平贸易理念在贫困地区实施扶贫互助贸易

借鉴国际公平贸易理念在贫困地区实施扶贫互助贸易