Productivity effects and determinants of public infrastructure investment

This study aims to investigate three important issues whether or not public infrastructure contributes to production in the private sector, whether or not political economy factors such as political situation affect the allocation of public infrastructure investment, and what the government’s investment behavior is. We estimate simultaneous equations by using a panel data set of 46 prefectures in Japan for five-time periods from 1975 to 1990. We conclude the following: (1) public capital contributes to productivity, (2) the investment behavior of both governments is efficiency-oriented for private productivity and for the capital stock level, (3) a substitute of public capital investment between the national and prefectural governments can be found, (4) there is a clear political factor in the national government’s public investment function, and (5) the availability of national government grants for the construction of infrastructure boosts investment among prefectural governments.     

The paradox of unequal regional investment and equal regional economic growth in China

China's policy on Special Economic Zones has attracted increasing flows of direct foreign investment to China. The investment has been very unequally distributed among China's 30 regions.  The article focuses on the regional economic growth as a result of the direct foreign investment in the region and its spillover effects on neighboring regions. The unequal distribution of direct foreign investment should in principle tend to enlarge the regional economic differences. The article, however, shows that this is not the result of the investment.  The empirical findings highlight the impact of direct foreign investment on the Chinese regional economies in transition. Received: November 2000/Accepted: August 2001     

Private housing investment in Belgium between the wars

Little published material is available on patterns of housebuilding in Belgium. This paper provides a discussion of the Belgian housing boom of the 1930s and considers various explanations for it. It concludes that the relatively high level of residential building is associated with a favourable ratio of rents to construction costs and that government policy was significant in this.     

Belief change and its determinants in a regional setting

A modification of the Osgood-Tannenbaum sociopsychological model of belief change is applied to University of Cincinnati student perceptions of Southwest Ohio and of the Kentucky Bluegrass. Students scale their beliefs about the two regions; after a week, they are given a factual presentation associating the two regions and asked to again scale their beliefs. The variable which proves most important in the resultant belief changes for the Kentucky Bluegrass is the separation of the two regions on a student's initial belief scale, suggesting the willingness of the students to believe the new information. Further analysis indicates that although objective differences in the regions affect initial beliefs, they play a negligible role in the degree to which students change their beliefs. A “halo effect” is also discovered, in which beliefs not mentioned in the presentation change in predictable directions. The empirical results appear encouraging to recent efforts which have been made to change popular impressions about places.     

Public investment in transportation infrastructures and regional asymmetries in Portugal

The objective of this paper is to investigate the regional incidence of the effects of public investment in transportation infrastructures in Portugal. Our methodological approach consists of estimating vector autoregressive (VAR) models for the national economy as well as for each of the five administrative regions in the country. In the regional models, both public investment in transportation infrastructures in the region and public investment in transportation infrastructures elsewhere are considered, thereby taking into consideration the potential existence of regional spillovers. Empirical results suggest that although public investment in transportation infrastructures has been a powerful instrument to promote long-term growth, it does so in a way that is rather unbalanced across regions. We show that public investment in transportation infrastructures has markedly contributed to the concentration of economic activity in Lisbon, the largest region in the country, and therefore has contributed markedly to the macrocephaly of the country.

Foreign direct investment in American service sectors: source country contrasts and locational determinants

Foreign direct investment in United States service sectors is an essential component of the competition among global industrial core regions. European, Canadian, and Japanese firms generate most foreign services jobs. Acquisition is the favored mode of entry and foreign establishments are generally larger and pay higher wages than their domestic counterparts. Though the surge of foreign investment in the 1980s was sectorally extensive, jobs in foreign services firms grew much faster than those in manufacturing. This paper reports a regression analysis of the location of foreign employment in six disaggregated sectors across U.S. states in 1987. The results show that foreign and domestic interstate locational patterns of employment strongly correlate. Because acquisition is the most common mode of entry, this empirical finding suggests that the supply of acquisition candidates primarily decides foreign investors' locational choices. Additional influences on location include the concentration of jobs in foreign business and professional services firms in localized areas of production, a general attraction of foreign investors in most service sectors to states with skilled labor forces, and an avoidance of Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states. I found little evidence that foreign investors in services avoid high-wage states more than their domestic counterparts.     

Embedded Tenures: Private Renting and Housing Policy in Surat,India

Over the past two decades, urban housing research in poorer countries has drawn attention to the importance and significance of rental housing. Increasingly, this is also being recognised by international development agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat). However, the housing policies of national governments have been resilient to change–the conferring of ownership rights is preferred to attempts at fostering a range of tenure options. Drawing upon primary research in Surat, the second largest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, this paper argues that this is in part the result of complex economic, social and political processes embedded in the relations of production, exchange and consumption of rental housing, which in turn raises questions as to how best poorer landlords are to be supported.     

新疆城镇化发展的区域差异及决定因素分析

新疆各地区城镇发展不平衡很大程度是由其经济发展水平和三次产业发展程度决定的。本文利用城镇化不平衡指数,以新疆15个地、州、市为基本单元,对新疆城镇化区域差异进行了具体分析。同时,通过回归分析,探讨了新疆城镇化发展与其决定因素之间的内在关系,即农业的发展模式和主导地位一定程度阻碍着新疆城镇化的发展,工业已成为北疆和东疆城镇化发展的主要推动力,第三产业在新疆城镇化发展中的推动作用较弱。     

非洲道路投资模式该变了

公路杀手交通事故每年在全世界造成130万人死亡,5000万人重伤,其中90％以上发生在中低收入国家.道路交通事故是15～29岁人群中排名第一的死亡原因,在5～14岁人群死亡原因中位居第二.对于所有年龄段的人群而言,到2030年,道路交通伤亡将从死亡原因的第9位上升到第5位,排在艾滋病、疟疾和肺结核之前.     

Strategic investment planning in regional deployment of telecommunication services: a real options approach

In this paper we perform an empirical study to create an optimal investment strategy for the regional deployment of IMT-2000, a next-generation telecommunication service in Korea. We develop a multiple real option model using a binomial lattice, to evaluate managerial flexibility. Managerial flexibility is evaluated specifically in terms of its decision-making ability, when considering two deferral options and a sequential compound option for investment. Using the model, we evaluate the IMT-2000 project and find the optimal investment strategy for the three regions of Korea, depending on the annual market situation.     

Staged efficiency and its determinants of regional innovation systems: a two-step analytical procedure

An efficiency-oriented analysis of regional innovation systems will enhance the public’s understanding of their operational ‘quality’, help policymakers in benchmarking innovation performance, and thereby improve policymaking. This study proposes a coherent two-step analytical procedure for modelling the efficiency performance of regional innovation systems and its determinants. The first step of the procedure involves measuring efficiency associated with a sophisticated network data envelopment analysis model, which accounts for the linkages between the two disaggregated sub-processes, namely an upstream technological creation process (TCrP) and a downstream technological commercialisation process (TCoP), during a technological innovation process (TIP). The procedure simultaneously deals with overall TIP efficiency as well as the two component TCrP and TCoP efficiencies in a united framework. In the second step of the procedure, the paper examines the effects of policy-oriented environmental factors on the respective efficiency scores of the three processes (TIP, TCrP, and TCoP) associated with a flexible partial least squares regression. We apply the two-step hybrid analytical procedure to China’s province-level regional innovation systems. Our empirical study shows that China’s regional innovation systems perform poorly in both technological creation efficiency and technological commercialisation efficiency at the provincial average level. This awkward situation is attributed to unfavourable environmental factors. Our findings indicate that the embedded and contextualised policy-oriented environment does not effectively suit the TIP within China’s regional innovation systems.     

浅析新建地方本科院校工程投资控制

针对新建地方本科院校为迎接教育部本科教学评估大举扩建、财务状况紧张的背景,提出了新建地方本科院校工程投资控制的目的,分析了工程建设各个阶段投资控制的实施方法。     

永汉镇——发挥区域优势优化投资环境

永汉镇地处广东省龙门县南部,是龙门县通往珠三角的重要出口。地形为四面环山的小平原盆地。西南与增城市接壤,西北紧靠南昆山国家森林公园,与从化市接壤。距龙门县城45公里、广州98公里、东莞70公里、深圳130公里。2001年被列入广东省重点中心镇。全镇总面积215平方公里(其中镇区面积1.3平方公里),总人口4.8万(其中城镇区人口1.5万),21个村民委员会、2个居民委员会、239个村民小组(自然村)。近年来,镇党委、镇政府根据自身的优势,因地制宜地提出了“农业稳镇、工业强镇、旅游旺镇、商贸活镇”的战略指导思想,已取得明显的效果。全镇2003年…     

印度适宜技术模式下的地域性设计初探

本文以三个层面简略地分析了当代印度地域性设计中的适宜技术。     

Understanding the role of business services and growth: issues in modeling regional patterns

Some urban regions have adapted well to the structural transition from manufacturing to services while others suffered significant drops in employment and income [Gatrell JD (1999) Soc Sci J 36(4):623–639; Kyung W (1994) Ph.D. dissertation, Portland State University]. Most studies of services have examined particular urban regions using survey and interview techniques [Harrington J (1995) Prof. Geogr 47:87–98; Beyers W (1991) Growth Change 22(4):27–51]. To better understand the important role played by business services in economic development, we developed a modeling framework analyzing regional pattern of business service changes. This study found the pattern of business service changes across urban regions sensitive to shifts in population, the effects of income, measures of corporate sales and manufacturing, controlling for inertia and regional location.     

The determinants of regional variations in private car ownership: Some evidence from irish data

Linear and nonlinear models of per capita car ownership rates are fitted to three cross-sections of data for the counties of the Republic of Ireland. The explanatory variables are per capita average real income and population density. The results suggest that both are significant with positive and negative effects respectively. The findings are compared with those from earlier studies of British and American data.     

An analysis of the determinants of internal labor mobility in India

Summary Several variables have been chosen which might reasonably be expected to explain the interstate migration which has occurred in India. The independent variables used in the study explain a fairly high percentage of the variance in migration between states, and all variables except U_j are significant at the 5 percent level or better. The distance variable consistently has in absolute value the highest elasticity in the various estimated relationships, and it is the variable which contributes most in terms of addition to R². This result is similar to those of other studies dealing with both advanced and less-developed countries, but it appears that the deterring effects of distance may be greater in India than in other countries studied. Migration in India tends to be away from low-income states and toward high-income states, a finding which is similar to those for Ghana, Egypt, and Brazil. Migration also tends to be away from and to populous states, and while migration is away from highly urbanized states, it does not seem to be toward highly urbanized places in India,ceteris paribus. However, migration does tend to be in the direction of places which are urbanizing rapidly and away from places which are urbanizing slowly. There is evidence that in India mobility tends to increase with increased education; this finding is contrary to what was found for Ghana, Egypt, and Brazil. Migration in India also tends to be toward places which display relatively high levels of educational achievement.He is grateful to R. M. Rao for helpful comments, but accepts full responsibility for remaining shortcomings.