Multi-dimensional boundary effects and regional economic integration: Evidence from the Yangtze River Economic Belt

While the challenges posed by multi-dimensional boundary effects to global economic integration are studied widely, regional economic integration within a sovereign country requires additional analysis. The Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), a super-scale interprovincial area including three nested urban alliances, is a meaningful vision of regional economic integration in China. After building the producer services-based urban corporate network, this study investigates the influence of multi-dimensional boundary effects on regional economic integration by social network analysis and the exponential random graph model. The findings show that the fragmented reality of YREB’s economy is significantly different from the vision of the Chinese central government. More specifically, although the natural boundary restraints represented by distance have disappeared, multi-dimensional barriers to regional economic integration are still posed by administrative, policy, economic, and cultural boundaries. The estimation results pass the robustness test of the grouping sample of producer services. Therefore, we confirm that the multi-dimensional boundary effects, particularly the intangible ones, significantly impact regional economic integration even within a country with a top-down ‘strong’ governance.

The Response of Creative Class Members to Regions Vying to Attract Them With Subsidies

There are no theoretical studies in regional science that examine which region to locate in from the standpoint of a creative class member, given that the pertinent regional authorities (RAs) are competing among themselves to attract the creative class using subsidies. This gap provides the motivation for our paper. This paper’s contribution is that it is the first to theoretically study the regional location choice of creative class members when the RAs of the locations in which they might locate are using subsidies to attract them. Specifically, a knowledge good producing creative class member must decide which of two regions ( A or B) to locate his plant in. This good is produced using a Cobb–Douglas function with creative and physical capital. We analyze plant location in four cases. In the benchmark case, we show that the representative creative class member ought to locate his plant in the less expensive region B. Next, we show that a small subsidy to creative capital by region A switches the plant location decision from region B to A. Finally, when both regions grant identical subsidies to creative capital, the representative creative class member is indifferent between locating in regions A and B. So, for identical subsidies to affect the plant location decision, they are better targeted to physical and not to creative capital. JEL Codes: R11, R58

Abstentionist Voting – Between Disengagement and Protestation in Neglected Areas: A Spatial Analysis of The Paris Metropolis

This article analyzes electoral behaviors related to voting abstention in the Metropolis of Paris. We highlight the interest of a contextual approach to examine non-voting behaviors. Using socio-economic and demographic data at the level of municipalities, we construct a spatial model to explain the reasons for abstention. Our results support the idea that abstentionism expresses a disengagement behavior as well as a protestation behavior. People disengage from politics because they believe that politicians (no matter which party is in power) will not be able to change their situation. This hypothesis applies to non-voters peripheral to political life. We also show that these people tend to live in socio-economically marginalized areas. The protest attitude is found especially in “left-behind” areas that have experienced a significant decline in the supply of public services and local shops. Bridging the divide in these neglected areas is essential to avoid further marginalization and growing protest.

Regional Knowledge Capabilities, Entrepreneurial Activity, and Productivity Growth: Evidence from Italian NUTS-3 Regions

Knowledge has replaced labor as the key factor for productivity growth in innovation discourse. The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship (KSTE) provides the theoretical foundation to bridge the gap between knowledge and productivity growth. The way regional knowledge actually contributes to productivity growth requires a theoretical explanation because knowledge capability is an indirect and intangible input for regional productivity growth. Previous research has shown that entrepreneurship alone is insufficient to drive productivity improvements. We examine how knowledge capabilities lead to meaningful growth outcomes of new firms in a region. This study examines the determinants of productivity growth by analyzing the factors of entrepreneurship and knowledge capabilities at the regional level, especially considering the moderating effect of entrepreneurship between knowledge and regional growth; by comparing different dimensions of local knowledge capabilities; and by aggregating the contribution of knowledge capabilities and entrepreneurship to productivity growth at the regional level. The empirical analysis is performed on Italian NUTS-3 regions by utilizing an integrated data set combining patent data from the EPO PATSTAT database, and regional data from Eurostat regional statistics. This study makes two main contributions to the KSTE literature by linking knowledge, entrepreneurship, and regional growth and by providing empirical results on different aspects of regional knowledge capability. Our findings identify which types of local knowledge capabilities are more important and how related innovative activity interacts with entrepreneurial activity, elucidating the mechanisms by which knowledge affects labor productivity through entrepreneurship.

The Decline of Small Cities: Increased Competition from External Shopping Malls or Long-Term Negative Trends?

We use the entry of 17 external shopping malls in Sweden to investigate how they have affected the performance of incumbent firms located in the city centres of small cities. Estimating a traditional fixed effects regression model while controlling for firm-specific heterogeneity, we find that entry by external shopping malls decreased the labour productivity of incumbent firms in city centres by 5.31%. Revenues decrease by 6.62%, while the reduction in the number of employees (0.45%) is small and not significantly different from zero. However, using time-specific fixed effects to control for common time trends in retailing in small cities, we find that the impact on labour productivity, revenues and the number of employees due to the entry of external shopping malls becomes insignificant. Thus, incumbent firms in small cities have a negative development path mainly due to long-term economic trends, possibly because of the combination of urbanization effects and a lack of local investments.

Macroeconomics Meets regional science: How national economic activity is Related to regional economic activity

Macroeconomics and regional science have developed as separate disciplines. However, the fact that the gross domestic product is the sum of gross regional products suggests that the two disciplines are related. The present study considers the implications of regional science and economic geography for macroeconomics. Specifically, a spatial econometric model for Israel is simulated to explore the implications of regional productivity and amenity shocks for gross regional products and the gross domestic product. We show that the effects of productivity shocks on the gross domestic product depend on where they occur and may even be negative. These results question estimates of the effect of productivity shocks in macroeconomic models in terms of spatial aggregation bias. They also provide empirical evidence rejecting the spatial granularity hypothesis regarding the secular relation between macroeconomic economic activity and regional economic activity. The study concludes with speculations about the implications of macroeconomics for regional science.

Illusions of Clustering: A Systematic Evaluation on the Effects of Clusters on Regional Economic Performance in Korea

Korea has pursued a cluster-based policy to increase industrial competitiveness and to alleviate development gaps between the regions. However, local governments have often oversupplied clusters without an objective examination of the demands and conditions in the regions. Based on these concerns, this study analyses effects and interdependencies of factors related to regional innovation and growth in Korea. Employing a PCA method and a GLS regression models on panel data, we generated three composite factors, social, capacity, and clustering, and estimated their effects on regional economic performance. The results show that it is important to have a favorable socio-economic setting to foster growth by clusters. In addition, cluster-based policies may have weaker effects than expected, because the effect of R&D capacity on regional growth was stronger and longer lasting. Finally, some specific elements that most affected economic growth in Korea’s regions are identified. The overall results indicate favorable environments should be established beforehand to foster regional growth with clusters, which confirms “jobs follow people.”

Profit Pools and Determinants of Potential County-Level Manufacturing Growth

Business location research often focuses on evaluating specific policies or explaining outcomes for a particular region. Further, the micro-foundations of random profit maximization supporting manufacturing location analysis often lack the intuitive nature of demand thresholds. While this article maintains these micro-foundations, it introduces a unifying concept of profit pools and examines how proximate supply/cost factors determine potential local manufacturing size. The approach avoids a number of limitations associated with other locational choice models. Restricted-access establishment-level data from the Longitudinal Business Database along with secondary data sources produce a model to estimate county-level contributors to outcomes of manufacturing establishment growth and consolidation. The analysis offers improved methods and accuracy for modeling establishment location outcomes, including accuracy in measuring industry size and methods for choosing among various count data distributions. The locational factors associated with county-level potential for manufacturing vary in magnitude and significance depending on the type of manufacturing, while affirming the importance of agglomeration across manufacturing types.

Understanding the City-transport System of Urban Agglomeration through Improved Space Syntax Analysis

From the perspective of city-transport system, this article applies space syntax to analyze the physical integration of cities. Traditionally, space syntax is mainly applied to urban areas, buildings, and other scales. However, when space syntax is applied to the configuration analysis of urban agglomeration, the change of scale causes changes in spatial perception and human behavioral patterns. Thus, we present a new method of space syntax. This method defines the lane and track between entrance and exit, and city as node, which represents small-scale space. Infrastructure, such as stations, entrances, and exits, are defined as links. The urban agglomeration is thus transformed into a topological network, and then displayed as a bipartite graph of cities and routes. We take the urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches (YRMR) as the case study area and analyze its spatial configuration from the perspectives of local and integral, interfaces at different scales, gaps, evolution of the dual foreground and background networks, and evolution of the transport networks. The results reveal the way cities integrate with each other and further reveal the multi-scale spatial structure of urban agglomeration.

Entrepreneurship, Broadband, and Gender: Evidence from Establishment Births in Rural America

Broadband access may have important implications for establishment births in rural areas, which feature thinner markets. Broadband may be especially important for rural nonemployer businesses, particularly those without a storefront, for access to nontraditional market channels. As women are more likely to run these types of small businesses, we further expect that broadband may have important implications for women-led businesses. With an effective instrumental variable approach, we find evidence that broadband access is a key factor leading to a higher establishment birth rate across business size and gender in rural areas. This paper identifies the largest effects on nonemployer, women-led and remote rural establishments.