Measuring intra-distribution income dynamics: an application to the European regions

This paper addresses the issue of intra-distribution income dynamics at the European regional level for the periods 1980–1993 and 1993–2005. In order to assess whether the results depend on the estimation method, the paper applies and compares two relatively novel techniques: the highest conditional density region approach and a new mobility measure based on a discrete-time Markov chain approach. An interesting conclusion and a methodological lesson have been obtained. The conclusion is that, whatever the technique used, the degree of intra-distribution mobility—which has favoured convergence—has been much higher in the first than in the second period. The lesson is that the use of different approaches is highly recommended not only for the sake of robustness but also because they offer additional insights into intra-distribution dynamics.     

Human capital in firms and regions: Impact on firm productivity

This paper analyses the importance of human capital for firm productivity and makes a clear distinction between the role of human capital inside and outside of the firm. A multilevel model is used for the business service sector in Sweden controlling for heterogeneity across the industry and municipal level. Human capital in firms in terms of education, experience, and cognitive skills and the firm's overall access to human capital has a positive impact on firm productivity. In addition, firm attributes explain the largest proportion of firm productivity variance.     

Territorial patterns of innovation: a taxonomy of innovative regions in Europe

The recent policy approach to innovation calls for thematically/regionally focused innovation policies in line with the place-based approach (EC – Commission of the European Communities, 2010). To achieve this goal, without incurring the unrealistic situation of having one policy action for each European region, a sound taxonomy on innovative European regions is required. The present paper claims that the existing taxonomies are somewhat unsatisfactory, since either they group European regions only on the basis of the intensity of their knowledge production, taking it for granted that knowledge equates to innovation, or they lack a priori on the conceptual links among the variables used, and the territorial conditions behind local innovation modes. The paper presents a territorial taxonomy of innovative regions based on a new conceptual approach which interprets, not one single phase of the innovation process, but the alternative modes of performing the different phases of the innovation process, highlighting the context conditions that accompany each “territorial pattern of innovation.” The paper conceptually derives different territorial patterns of innovation and identifies them empirically for European regions.     

The role of social capital in regional innovation systems: Creative social capital and its institutionalization process

In the literature on regional innovation systems, one strand of study has identified a number of gaps that limit the efficiency and effectiveness of regional innovation systems, including so-called ‘managerial gaps’, ‘structural holes’, ‘innovation gaps’, and ‘valleys of death’. Our project aims to demonstrate how social capital, in a creative tension that balances bonding and bridging elements, may contribute to reducing these specific gaps identified in the regional innovation systems literature. This perspective is analysed within a particular context: the Mondragon Cooperative Group in the Basque Country.     

Determinants of the spatial distribution of exporters in regions: the role of ownership

The Annals of Regional Science - Spatial distribution of exporters only recently has attracted the attention of researchers, while the location of economic activity as such has been subject of...     

Spatial planning traditions in Europe: their role in the ESDP process1

Making and applying the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) is an example of ‘Europeanization’. Europeanization is the outcome of the interaction between actors with various motivations. In the case of the ESDP process, these motivations reflect the spatial planning traditions and the institutional set‐ups of the relevant actors. As a preliminary, the paper describes the ESDP. It then analyses the motivations, reflecting as they do their spatial planning traditions and institutional set‐ups, of four key actors without whom the ESDP would not have been what it is: France, the Netherlands, Germany and the European Commission. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects of European spatial planning after enlargement.     

The two faces of R&D and human capital: Evidence from Western European regions

This paper investigates two channels through which R&D and human capital may affect regional total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector. Our model allows for both a direct effect on productivity growth, reflecting own innovation, and an indirect effect, reflecting imitation of frontier technology. The results provide evidence of a positive and significant direct effect of human capital, and a positive and significant indirect effect of R&D. Our estimates also suggest that R&D aids the imitation of technology from geographically close regions, while human capital raises productivity growth in regions that are closer to the frontier than their neighbours.     

The spillover effects of public capital on the Turkish private manufacturing industries in the geographical regions

This paper investigates the spillover effects of public capital formation on the Turkish private manufacturing industry at the regional level over the period 1980–2000. The aggregate effects of public capital cannot be captured entirely from the direct effects of public capital installed in the region itself. Spillovers are also an integral part of the regional impact of public capital installed in the outside of the region. Therefore, we estimate the dynamic effects of public capital using VAR models for the seven regions of Turkey by including capital formation installed outside of the region. The results show that direct effects of public capital are positive in some regions, while indirect effects of public capital are positive in most regions. A previous version of this study was presented at the METU/ERC International Conference in Economics VII, 6–9 September 2003, Ankara, Turkey.     

Duality theory and cost function analysis in a regional context: the impact of public infrastructure capital in the Greek regions

The resurgent interest in the role of infrastructure on development, spurred by the work on Aschauer in the late eighties, has produced a voluminous research activity, both at national and regional levels. Even though the majority of this research is based on production function analysis, more recently has emerged the alternative analytical framework of duality theory and cost function analysis. The latter is utilised here, in an effort to investigate public capital's impact on manufacturing at the regional level (Greek prefectures). Public capital categories have been grouped to two major categories of `productive' and `social' infrastructure. The latter seems to play little role in reducing private costs, but the former appears to be an important cost reduction influence. It can also be demonstrated that infrastructure has a substitutional relationship with labour and intermediate inputs, and a complementary one with private capital. Received: November 1998/Accepted: August 2001     

A Europe of regions — the West Midlands of England: planning for metropolitan change in Birmingham

In 1992, western Europe's markets will expand with the creation of a unified market. The political shifts in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union may further alter conditions. Cities like Birmingham will undergo social and economic reorganization as its sphere of influence changes. In this expanding context, there is growing competition between the nuclear perspective of present planning, and the reality of polynuclear expansion, propelled by market forces, without benefit of anything resembling strategic thinking at the regional and inter regional scale. Although there is some interagency cooperation leading to strategic guidance for matters needing immediate resolution, there is a need for more fundamental dialogue which might lead to a reevaluation of metropolitan and regional structure.     

Nonlinearities in regional economic growth and convergence: the role of entrepreneurship in the European union regions

Nonlinearities have been identified in recent literature on growth and convergence at the cross-country level and they have been associated with a number of variables of interest such as initial conditions and human capital accumulation. This research takes the analysis at the regional level within a European context while focusing on entrepreneurship and, using semiparametric regression techniques, provides evidence for nonlinear effects of the base-year income per capita on growth suggesting that convergence may be a phenomenon restricted to particular income bands. Entrepreneurship has a positive effect on regional growth and no serious departures from linearity are detected, while evidence for an almost L-shaped relationship between income per capita levels and self-employment rates was produced. A quality-adjusted proxy for human capital stock was found to be a positive and significant determinant of economic growth across European regions but, again, no departures for linearity were detected for this effect.     

Explaining the dynamics of relatedness: The role of co-location and complexity

Relatedness has become a key concept for studying the diversification of firms, regions and countries. However, studies tend to treat relatedness as being time-invariant or, alternatively, consider its evolution as exogenously given. This study argues that relatedness is inherently dynamic and endogenous to technological and economic developments. Using patent data, we test the extent to which relatedness between technologies developed along co-location and differences in technological complexity in 1980–2010. Our results show that co-located technologies are more likely to become related over time. Moreover, our results suggest that co-location and complexity of technologies are conducive to the intensification of relatedness over time.     

Fixed term contracts and employers' human capital: The role of educational spillovers

This paper analyses the role of the employers' education on the spread of temporary contracts. Taking advantage of a unique firm‐level dataset, we test whether the share of fixed term workforce in a firm is affected by the employer's level of education. Furthermore, we test whether knowledge spillovers arising from the agglomeration of university graduate employers affect the incidence of temporary employment in the firms located in the area. In both cases we find a negative effect. Interestingly, only small firms are influenced by the spillovers. The possible problems of endogeneity of the agglomeration variable are coped with an IV approach.     

Migration and institutional quality across Italian provinces: The role of human capital

A recent literature strand has emphasized the importance of international migration on the institutional quality of sending and receiving countries. On the contrary, there is no evidence of the effects of intra-national, interregional mobility on government quality, a phenomenon which is particularly relevant in countries affected by significant internal dualism. Using a system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM) estimator on a 2004–2012 panel dataset, this paper empirically investigates the relationship between internal net-migration and institutional quality of Italian provinces. The findings show that migration has a relevant and positive effect on the quality of institutions only when the human capital content is taken into account.     

企业实施资本运营的几种思路

1股份改制、吸纳资本企业要正确把握产权清晰、权责明确、政企分开、管理科学的要求,以搞活优势企业,壮大存量资产出发,大张其“股”,大力实施股份制和股份合作制改造,改变国有企业单一的资本结构,实现产权多元化,是有限责任公司的企业要依章进行增资扩股,不断加快企业改制步伐     

历史古都扬州的发展思考

从审视扬州历史的繁荣和历史遗产在现代生活的存在现状,对比扬州在江苏省的经济发展地位,思考历史遗产在现代生活中所起的重要作用,并切实提出了有利于扬州历史文化名城今后经济发展的保护与发展措施。     

Modeling the dynamics of landscape structure in Asia’s emerging desakota regions: a case study in Shenzhen

The rapid urbanization taking place in Asia since 1970 has exhibited a process different from that of the developed countries in the West. This process has contributed to the emergence of a new landscape in Asia — widely known as the desakota (a combination of two Indonesian words: “desa” for village, “kota” for town) regions described in the McGee–Ginsburg model. These desakota regions are characterized by an intense mix of agricultural and non-agricultural activities that often stretch along corridors between large city cores. Although, the McGee–Ginsburg model captures the socio-demographic dimensions of the rapid urbanization process, little is known about the dynamics of landscape structures in the emerging desakota regions in Asia. By linking remote sensing, landscape characterization indices, and cellular automata modeling with geographic information systems (GIS), this paper develops a GIS-based spatial analysis and modeling approach to study the landscape dynamics of the desakota regions in southeast China. We tested our method using data between 1992 and 1996 for the city of Longhua in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone — one of the fastest growing areas in southeast China. The results not only confirm the effectiveness of GIS-based spatial analysis and modeling approach in studying the ecological impacts of human activities, but also reveal the salient features of landscape dynamics in the desakota regions. Drawing from the results of this research, we conclude that the pace of urbanization and the size of desakota regions must be controlled in order to create a sustainable future in developing countries.