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on Economic Geography |
| By: | Otto Raspe; Frank van Oort |
| Abstract: | In this paper we contribute to the longstanding discussion on the role of knowledge to economic growth in a spatial context. We observe that in adopting the European policy strategy towards a competitive knowledge economy, The Netherlands is – as most European countries - mainly oriented towards industrial, technological factors. The policy focus is on R&D specialized regions in their spatial economic strategies. We place the knowledge economy in a broader perspective. Based on the knowledge economy literature, we value complementary indicators: the successful introduction of new products and services to the market (‘innovation’) and indicators of skills of employees (‘knowledge workers’). Using econometric analysis, we relate the three factors ‘R&D’, ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge workers’ to regional economic growth. We conclude that the factors ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge workers’ are more profoundly related to urban employment and productivity growth than the R&D-factor. Preferably, urban research and policymakers should therefore take all three knowledge factors into account when determining economic potentials of cities. |
| Keywords: | knowledge economy, economic geography, urban economic growth, innovation, knowledge workers, spatial econometrics |
| Date: | 2006–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:0607&r=geo |
| By: | Silvia Loddo |
| Abstract: | The lack of convergence across Italian Regions has been widely cited as an incontrovertible proof of failure of Cohesion policy. This paper aims to provide a twofold contribution to the debate on the effectiveness of Cohesion policies in Italy. Firstly, we provide an up-to-date view of convergence across Italian regions by focussing on the period covered by regional development policies carried out by European Community. The analysis reveals that poorer regions in Italy have indeed caught up with the richer regions over the period 1994-2004 and much of this convergence process has occurred towards region-specific steady states. Secondly, we consider Structural Funds as a conditioning variable in the convergence equation by using recently available data on expenditure implemented during the Second and the Third Planning Period. Our panel estimates point to a positive and significant impact of the Structural Funds on regional convergence in Italy over the period 1994-2004. When the Structural Funds are considered individually we find that the expenditure allocated by ERDF has medium term positive and significant returns while support to agriculture has short-term positive effects on growth which wane quickly. Finally, our results cast some doubt both on the (i) distributive efficiency of resources allocated by ESF and (ii) on the effectiveness of the intervention policies in support to education, Human capital and employment. |
| Date: | 2006 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cns:cnscwp:200603&r=geo |
| By: | Lúcia Paiva Martins de Sousa (Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Viseu); Pedro Cosme da Costa Vieira (Faculdade de Economia do Porto) |
| Abstract: | Sendo que há necessidade de conhecer a qualidade relativa das “revistas internacionais com avaliação” especializadas em economia regional e urbana, na literatura não existe tal listagem. Para colmatar esta lacuna, apresentamos neste trabalho uma hierarquização e uma classificação das 39 revistas cobertas pela base de dados bibliográfica ISI Web of Knowledge que têm no nome a palavra “Regional” ou “Urban” ou que pertencem a “Urban Studies”. Concluímos que a revista Journal of Urban Economics é a que tem maior índice de qualidade (0.058) que, apesar de ser relativamente muito elevado, é bastante menor que o índice de qualidade das revistas generalistas de topo que publicam artigos nesta área, i.e. a American Economic Review (0.194), a Econometrica (0.169) e o Journal of Business and Economic Statistics (0.118). |
| Keywords: | Economia regional e urbana, Ranking de revistas científicas |
| JEL: | R00 C21 |
| Date: | 2005–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:por:fepwps:193&r=geo |
| By: | Abdel-Rahman, Hesham M. (University of New Orleans) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the impacts of free trade on the structure of urban systems, skill distribution, and income disparities. The paper proposes a model that integrates international trade theory and the theory of urban system. This is done in a two sector, spatial general equilibrium model of a North-South trade. Each country is populated with a continuum of unskilled workers with heterogeneous potential ability. Through differential training costs, workers with different potential ability can achieve the same productivity. Workers can acquire a skill by investing in training. Thus, skill distribution in both countries is determined endogenously in the model through self-selection. The economy produces a final good with the use of a high-tech intermediate input and unskilled workers. Horizontally differentiated skilled workers produce the high-tech intermediate input. Cities are formed in this model as a result of investment in setup cost, i.e., public infrastructures. I characterize two different types of spatial equilibria: a closed-economy equilibrium, in which each country consists of a system of cities without trade, and a free-trade equilibrium, in which we allow for trade between cities and countries. |
| Keywords: | Potential ability, Training, Cities |
| JEL: | R13 R51 F16 |
| Date: | 2005–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uno:wpaper:2005-13&r=geo |
| By: | Hannu Hernesniemi; Martti Kulvik |
| JEL: | R11 R12 R41 L65 |
| Date: | 2006–04–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rif:dpaper:1013&r=geo |
| By: | Peter Doeringer (Institute for Economic Development, Boston University); Christine Evans-Klock (International Labor Organization); David Terkla (University of Massachusetts, Boston) |
| Abstract: | National data and case studies are used to test the importance of management practices, particularly high performance practices, on the location decisions of new manufacturing plants. We find that plants with high performance management cultures rely on different criteria when making their location decisions, and also weigh standard location criteria differently, than those plants that are managed in more traditional ways. Omitting management culture from studies of business location may, therefore, result in biased estimates of the importance of various traditional location factors. By more accurately specifying location models for manufacturing plants with high performance management cultures, we are able to offer new insights for regional development policy. |
| Keywords: | Management Practices and Firm Location |
| JEL: | R3 R58 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bos:iedwpr:dp-125&r=geo |
| By: | Heike Link (German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the cost bahaviour of motorway renewal costs with the aim to derive an estimate of marginal infrastructure costs per vehicle-km of trucks as part of optimal road user charges. The analysis is based on cross-sectional data of motorway renewal costs and traffic volume per motorway section in Germany during the period 1980-1999. The translog model estimated in this paper includes the factor input prices for labour, material and capital, the average annual daily traffic volume of trucks and passenger cars with the respective second-order terms. and a set of dummy variables for regions (the German länder) as well as for the type of material used for renewal as the most explanatory variables. In contrast to this, we could not find any significant influence of the age of motorway sections, the past renewal expenditures and the climate conditions measured as days with temperature fluctuations around zero. The cost elasticity, i.e. the relationship between marginal and average costs found in this analysis ranges from 0.05 up to 1.17 with a digressive increase of marginal costs. |
| Keywords: | Cost functions, motorway renewal costs, marginal costs, infrastructure charging, road transport |
| JEL: | R48 L92 C31 |
| Date: | 2004–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mut:wpaper:09&r=geo |
| By: | Charles Ka Yui Leung (City University Hong Kong); Peiling Wei (City University Hong Kong) |
| Abstract: | Due to the relocation of manufacturing facilities from Hong Kong to Mainland China, it is widely believed that some vacant private factories have been used as offices in Hong Kong. Yet there is no direct and systematic evidence to support this speculation. In fact, according to MacGregor and Schwann (2003), industrial and commercial real estate shares some common features. Our research attempts to investigate empirically the price and volume relationship between industrial and commercial real estate, using both aggregate and disaggregate data from the industrial and commercial property markets in Hong Kong. The study was built on the observation that economic restructuring and geographical distance will affect the substitutability (and thus the correlation) of different types of property, and utilizes commonly used time series techniques for analysis. Policy implications are discussed. |
| Keywords: | aggregation bias, geographical distance, industrial real estate, |
| JEL: | G12 L80 R30 |
| Date: | 2006–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eab:financ:700&r=geo |
| By: | Robert E. B. Lucas (Institute for Economic Development, Bostom Imiversity); |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bos:iedwpr:dp-111&r=geo |
| By: | Ron Johnston; Deborah Wilson; Simon Burgess; Richard Harris |
| Abstract: | Schools are central to the goals of a multi-cultural society, but their ability to act as arenas within which meaningful inter-cultural interactions take place depends on the degree to which students from various cultural backgrounds meet there. Using recently-released data on the ethnic composition of both schools and small residential areas, this paper explores not only the extent of ethnic segregation in England’s schools but also whether that segregation is greater than the underpinning segregation in the country’s residential areas. The results show greater segregation in schools – considerably so for primary schools and more so for some ethnic groups relative to others – than in neighbourhoods, patterns which have considerable implications for educational policy. |
| Keywords: | ethnic segregation, neighbourhoods, schools |
| JEL: | I20 |
| Date: | 2006–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bri:cmpowp:06/145&r=geo |
| By: | Jakob Roland Munch; Michael Rosholm; Michael Svarer (Department of Economics, University of Aarhus, Denmark) |
| Abstract: | We investigate the impact of home ownership on individual job mobility and wages in Denmark. We find that home ownership has a negative impact on job-to-job mobility both in terms of transition into new local jobs and new jobs outside the local labour market. In addition, there is a clear negative effect of home ownership on the unemployment risk and a positive impact on wages. These results are robust to different strategies for correcting for the possible endogeneity of the home owner variable. |
| Keywords: | Home ownership, job mobility, duration model |
| JEL: | J6 R2 |
| Date: | 2006–05–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aah:aarhec:2006-06&r=geo |
| By: | Leonardo Gasparini (Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS) - Universidad Nacional de La Plata); Walter Sosa Escudero |
| Abstract: | Most income studies do not take into account the implicit rent obtained by households who inhabit their own dwellings, a fact that introduces a potentially relevant bias in inequality, poverty, and welfare measures. In this paper we estimate these implicit rents for the Greater Buenos Aires area from information of Argentina’s National Household Expenditures Survey (ENGH) of 1996/7. Based on a sample of households that rent their dwellings, quantile regressions are used to estimate observed rents from a hedonic model. Estimated coefficients are applied to households that do not rent their houses or apartments in order to predict the implicit rent derived from living in an owned house. Estimated implicit rents are added to the standard notion of household income and various inequality measures are reestimated. We find that the consideration of these implicit rents reduces inequality due to an income elasticity of spending in housing less than one, and to the relatively large proportion of house owners in the lower strata of the income distribution. |
| Keywords: | implicit rent, hedonic prices, quantile regression, housing, income distribution. |
| JEL: | D31 R21 |
| Date: | 2004–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0014&r=geo |
| By: | Didier Baudewyns (DULBEA, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels); Amynah Gangji (DULBEA, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels); Robert Plasman (DULBEA, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels) |
| Abstract: | Ce rapport de recherche a pour objet l’étude du coût budgétaire attendu et des effets économiques probables d’un programme ambitieux d’allocations-loyers en Région de Bruxelles-Capitale (RBC) selon 3 scénarios : (1) allocations-loyers versées à 5000 ménages demandeurs de logements sociaux ; (2) allocations-loyers pour les bénéficiaires du revenu d’intégration (R.I., ancien « minimex ») ; (3) allocations-loyers à tous les ménages les plus pauvres de la RBC (revenus inférieurs à la moitié du revenu médian en RBC). Comme dans d’autres pays, l’allocation couvrirait la différence entre un loyer plafond et un tiers du revenu environ. Cette étude est exploratoire puisque depuis la seconde guerre mondiale il n’y pas eu de système général d’allocation-loyer en Belgique. Les fourchettes du subside total calculées donnent néanmoins une idée de l’ordre de grandeur du coût budgétaire selon les différents scénarios. Celui-ci serait de l’ordre de 40 millions d’euros dans le scénario 1. Face au double constat d’un déficit excessif de l’offre de logements décents dans le segment « faibles revenus » à Bruxelles et de danger d’inflation des loyers, nous ne recommandons pas la mise en œuvre d’un programme d’allocations loyers dans cette ville. Avant d’y envisager une telle politique de stimulation de la demande, il faudrait d’abord accroître l’offre de logements sociaux et/ou subventionner la construction en général. L’idée est d’assainir d’abord la concurrence dans ce segment de marché (cf. les marchands de sommeil) et par là d’y stabiliser les prix. |
| Keywords: | allocation-loyer, loyer plafond, revenus, coût budgétaire, inflation. |
| JEL: | R31 |
| Date: | 2006–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dul:wpaper:06-04rr&r=geo |
| By: | Mototsugu Fukushige (Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University); Noriko Ishikawa (Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kobe University) |
| Abstract: | We propose a method for decomposing interregional differentials in productivities based on the lifecycle permanent income hypothesis and conduct an empirical analysis using data from prefectural economic accounts in Japan to examine the effectiveness of this method. |
| Keywords: | Interregional Differentials in Productivities, Decomposition of Inequality, Consumption Inequality |
| JEL: | R3 D30 H24 E20 |
| Date: | 2006–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osk:wpaper:0611&r=geo |