Fiscal Transfers in the Spatial Economy

Many countries shift substantial public resources across jurisdictions to mitigate spatial economic disparities. We use a general equilibrium model with multiple asymmetric regions, labor mobility, and costly trade to carve out the aggregate implications of fiscal transfers. Calibrating the model for Germany, we find that transfers indeed deliver smaller disparities across regions. This comes at the cost of lower national output, however, because economic activity is diverted away from core cities and toward remote areas with low productivity. But despite this loss in output per capita by about 2 percent in our baseline specification, welfare still increases by 0.07 percent because the transfer scheme countervails overcongestion in large cities. If the optimal transfer regime was implemented, welfare would increase by 0.06 percent. (JEL H77, J61, R12, R13, R23)

Introduction to Urban Science

This introduction outlines a portfolio of theory and methods in the chapters that develop a basic urban science for urban informatics. Inductive and deductive methods for generating data, analytics, and urban simulation, form the focus. In this first Part of the book, the emphasis is on mobility, space-time theory, energy and infrastructure, the spatial economy, and the role of modelling in understanding and planning the smart city.

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE SPATIAL ECONOMY AND THE THEORY OF NEW ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

The modern political and economic processes have had a significant impact on the change in the economic policy of Russia and its “internal” economic space. As a result of the “sanction” blocking of the significant sectors of the economy, the importance of considering the spatial factor of socio-economic development in the basic development program documents has increased. The article examines the main approaches to spatial organization of the regional economy and strategic directions of spatial development in the context of the “Strategy of Spatial Development of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2025”. These approaches are based on the joint evolution of this organization and the regional settlement system under the influence of a multiple external and internal factors, including the implementation of a rational state policy of regional development. The study examines the main provisions of the spatial economy as an independent scientific field and the theory of new economic geography. It shows the methodological similarity between these two scientific disciplines. The article shows that the basis of spatial development is the integration of specific forms of spatial organization of the economy into large and / or largest agglomerations. The leading role in this integration belongs to the regional communications system, which unites economic centers localized in an allocated space into an integral system and ensures the economic space unity. The implementation of the spatial economy provisions is studied on the example of the Northern Sea Route as a regional communications system, which is in fact the center of the “assembly” of the Arctic space. The functional dominant of the agglomeration as a form of spatial organization of the regional economy is creating such high-quality life conditions that are optimized with the rational economic development of the regional space while maintaining the economic situation at an acceptable level. These are the conditions that form communicative ties, which are the framework for uniting various elements of the regional space.

The networked economy of firms in city-region peripheries

City-regions have become a core unit of analysis for spatial economy, providing an explicit link between bounded administrative units and more networked spaces of production. Too often, however, such analysis is focused on the core of the city-region, applying presumptions of gravity-based agglomeration. This paper examines these networked spaces of production from the city-region periphery, using a firm-based approach as critical determinants of spatial economy via their key interactions. Focused on the Greater Birmingham city-region, UK, the paper explores the integration of city-regional geography with firm-based networked economy. In doing so, it applies a set of networks of practice, focused on firms’ factored, transactional, and transitional dependencies. Using these networks of practice, it critically analyses the spaces of production formed through firm-based interactions, and their concomitance with city-regional designations. It makes two key contributions. First, it enhances the call for greater understanding of the relationship between core and periphery in the context of city-regions. Second, it argues that network-based approaches, which form spatial economy around firm interactions over administrative configurations, offer useful insight into understanding firm–place relationships which more conventional place-based approaches cannot.

PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION "SMART CITY" CONCEPT IN MAJOR CITIES OF RUSSIA (ANALYSIS BY EXAMPLECITY OF YEKATERINBURG)

The article is devoted to the study of the processes of formation of "smart" cities in Russia. The relevance of the topic is due to the need of society to renew cities, improve the quality of urban space, its ability to ensure the sustainable functioning of the city and the provision of urban services, and strengthen competitiveness. The study on the example of Yekaterinburg highlighted barriers to the introduction of "smart" solutions in the city space, which prevent the launch of processes of complex implementation of the concept "Smart City," justified recommendations for their elimination. The methodological basis of the study is based on theoretical provisions of innovation economy, strategic management, regional and spatial economy. The results of the analysis can be useful to students of higher education, postgraduate students, research scientists, specialists engaged in the development of projects for smart cities, state and municipal employees, as well as other interested persons.

New Economic Geography

For research attempting to investigate why economic activities are distributed unevenly across geographic space, new economic geography (NEG) provides a general equilibrium-based and microfounded approach to modeling a spatial economy characterized by a large variety of economic agglomerations. NEG emphasizes how agglomeration (centripetal) and dispersion (centrifugal) forces interact to generate observed spatial configurations and uneven distributions of economic activity. However, numerous economic geographers prefer to refer to the term new economic geographies as vigorous and diversified academic outputs that are inspired by the institutional-cultural turn of economic geography. Accordingly, the term geographical economics has been suggested as an alternative to NEG. Approaches for modeling a spatial economy through the use of a general equilibrium framework have not only rendered existing concepts amenable to empirical scrutiny and policy analysis but also drawn economic geography and location theories from the periphery to the center of mainstream economic theory. Reduced-form empirical studies have attempted to test certain implications of NEG. However, due to NEG’s simplified geographic settings, the developed NEG models cannot be easily applied to observed data. The recent development of quantitative spatial models based on the mechanisms formalized by previous NEG theories has been a breakthrough in building an empirically relevant framework for implementing counterfactual policy exercises. If quantitative spatial models can connect with observed data in an empirically meaningful manner, they can enable the decomposition of key theoretical mechanisms and afford specificity in the evaluation of the general equilibrium effects of policy interventions in particular settings. Several decades since its proposal, NEG has been criticized for its parsimonious assumptions about the economy across space and time. Therefore, existing challenges still require theoretical and quantitative models on new microfoundations pertaining to the interactions between economic agents across geographical space and the relationship between geography and economic development.