This editorial discusses the importance of special issues for journals in regional science.
Administrative areas are arbitrarily designed and do not necessarily reflect the geographical patterns of socio-economic and labour market activity. Labour market areas (LMAs) are required to analyse spatial labour market activity and provide a framework to guide spatially-explicit employment policy development. This resource describes a data source of a set of recently created labour market areas for Chile.
Changes in zonal boundaries and coding schemes severely compromise temporal comparison of data. In Chile, the Population and Housing census is the only comprehensive source of internal migration data, but municipal boundaries and occupation and industry sector coding schemes have undergone various changes which hamper the temporal comparability of census data. This paper presents the CHilean Internal Migration database developed by Rowe and Bell (2013) which provides a temporally consistent framework for the analysis of internal migration over a period covering twenty-five years from 1977 to 2002. Specifically, it offers a hierarchical system of 304 municipalities, 51 provinces and 13 regions, and 10 occupational groups and 11 industrial sectors which are temporally consistent over the 1977-82, 1987-92 and 1997-2002 census intervals. The database can be downloaded from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoda/data/CHIM.zip.
Feeling socially integrated and being satisfied with one’s social life are important indicators for happiness and well-being of individuals and for the strength of local communities. The effect of the living environment on social networks and the importance of local social contacts in the neighborhood has been addressed by many studies. However, social satisfaction has received little attention in these studies. The aim of this study is to describe and predict the effect of personal and neighborhood characteristics on social satisfaction mediated by the impact of place attachment and neighborhood networks. A path analysis is used based on survey and diary data collected between April and May 2014 in Eindhoven and surroundings in the Netherlands among 177 respondents. Results show that social characteristics of the neighborhood play an important role in explaining social satisfaction of individuals. In addition, results confirm the importance of participating in social activities and walking or cycling in the neighborhood.
Hidden cities within a city? During the last decade there is a large trending literature concerning urban and suburban poverty concentration patterns. However, few are the cases where adequate data exist at a low spatial level, in order for scientists to explore that kind of socio-spatial phenomena. This paper tries to investigate the evolution of poverty within urban and suburban space, under a multidimensional framework, during a period of severe economic crisis and austerity measures. The metropolitan area of Athens is used as our case study, for which available data at a municipal level enable the calculation of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for the years 2006 and 2011. Using cluster analysis based on the MPI values, three groups of municipalities are derived within Athens. For each one of them, a mean MPI index is calculated and then decomposed. The results indicate that there is a clear spatial concentration of poverty in the west suburban areas of Athens. The urban core of the city is characterised by middle-income municipalities, whilst the north-east and the south-east suburban areas experience low-poverty indicators. Finally, the results suggest that during the economic crisis period poor areas were affected the most.
The spatial mismatch hypothesis states that a lack of connection to job opportunities may affect an individual’s prospects in the labour market, especially for low-skilled workers. This phenomenon is especially observed in large urban areas, in which low-skilled minorities tend to live far away from jobs and face geographical barriers to finding and keeping jobs. This paper aims to investigate whether this negative relationship between spatial mismatch and labour market outcomes is valid in Brazil after controlling for individual characteristics. Our conclusions indicate that there is no clear relation between different measures of accessibility to jobs and the probability of being unemployed. However, for wages there is a clear correlation, which is stronger in larger metropolitan areas in the country. Given the exploratory nature of this work, our results still rely on strong identification hypotheses to avoid potential bias related to simultaneous location decisions of workers and firms within the city. Even if these conditions do not hold, the results are still meaningful as they provide a better understanding of the conditional distribution of wages and the unemployment rate in the biggest metropolitan areas of Brazil.
This paper aims at demonstrating how countries' dependency on natural resources plays a crucial role in urban concentration. The Zipf's Curve Elasticity is estimated for a group of countries and related to a set of indicators of unilateral transferences. Results show that in comparison to others, countries with higher urban concentration explained by higher Zipf's Curve Elasticity have a higher percentage of income coming from natural resources and education expenditures whereas public spending in health and outflow of Foreign Direct Investment seem to have spatial redistribution effects. Summing up, there are signs that the spatial allocation of property rights over natural resources and related rents influences urban concentration.
This study examines the impact of the determinants of new firm formation in New England at the county level from 1999 to 2009. Based on the Spatial Durbin panel model that accounts for spillover effects, it is found that population density and human capital positively affect single-unit firm births within a county and its neighbors. Population growth rate also exerts a significant positive impact on new firm formation, but most of the effect is from spatial spillovers. On the contrary, the ratio of large to small firm in terms of employment size and unemployment rate negatively influence single-unit firm births both within counties and among neighbors. However, there is no significant impact of local financial capital and personal income growth on new firm formation.
Regional development policy aims to cope with the challenge of spatial disparities. It is based on a smart combination of various critical capital assets in a region which functionally and spatially interact and which yield synergetic economic opportunities and promising challenges for innovation and progress. The present study regards sustainable territorial performance – as a manifestation of regional development – as the overarching principle for competitive advantages and economic growth in a system of regions, which is particularly induced by territorial capital, comprising human capital, infrastructural capital and social capital. In the long-standing tradition of regional development policy a wide variety of effective facilitators or drivers of accelerated spatial growth has been distinguished, for instance, industrial districts, growth poles, growth centers, industrial complexes, special economic zones, communication axes, and so forth. In the past decades, a new concept has been introduced, viz. economic-technological clusters. An avalanche of literature has been published on the conceptual, operational and policy foundation and relevance of this concept, especially in relation to previously developed regional growth concepts. In this paper, clusters will be regarded as the spatial foci of sustainable territorial performance strategies and synergetic actions by both public and private actors. The present paper aims to address the relevance of cluster concepts for an effective regional development policy, based on the above notion of territorial capital. It does so by introducing a new concept, viz. effective cluster, in which spatial-economic synergy, local/regional concentration of industry, and the supporting role of territorial capital are regarded as the main determinants of a highly performing cluster in a given territory. The effective cluster concept will be tested on the basis of a field study on the aviation and aerospace cluster ‘Dolina Lotnicza’ in the Podkarpackie region in South-East Poland. This is one of the most vibrant high-tech clusters in thecountry. A new approach based on a triple-layer architecture will be adopted here, viz.: a quantitative comparative analysis of the 16 Polish ‘voivodships’ (main administrative regions in the country, at a NUTS-2 level), a benchmark analysis of the 25 counties (‘powiats’) within the Podkarpackie voivodship (at a NUTS-4 level), and an effective industrial cluster analysis on the basis of the individual aviation firms located in the Podkarpackie region. In each step an extended Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), characterised by a merger of a Slack-Based Measure (SMB) and a super-efficiency (SE) DEA, will be used in order to achieve an unambiguous ranking of the various regions or Decision Making Units (DMUs). The study will employ an extensive database on individual actors in the cluster, in combination with a broadly composed territorial-capital database for the areas under study. The paper will be concluded with some strategic policy lessons.
The paper is a part of a comprehensive research aimed at operationalizing HUL approach and experimenting it in the buffer zone of Pompei, mainly in Torre Annunziata (Italy), and is based on the recognition of art and cultural heritage as tools for "managing the change" of landscape. The proposed thesis is that the recovery of public space, configured by art and culture and shared with local community according to an inclusive approach, contribute to regenerate creativity, reconstructing the relationships between people, communities and landscape. This lays the foundations for a "creative environment" and regenerative, concived as a prerequisite of development. In this process, art is a driver which acts on the creativity of local residents, stimulating their critical thinking, open-mindedness and design capacity, and leading them to accept diversity as an opportunity. Focusing on theories and on the empirical analysis of a best practice, MAAM Museum in Rome, this paper has three main objectives: to produce empirical evidence on the cause/effect relationship between art, heritage and community relationships; to make transferable and replicable in other contexts, such as Torre Annunziata, the process experienced at MAAM; to develop a methodology able to soliciting, integrating and supporting the regeneration of relationships in the town of Torre Annunziata.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional tourist competitiveness performance in Spain. We use the seven pillars of tourism from a very detailed and complete database compiled by the Spanish Government –MoniTUR 2010 as primary data. Thus, we calculate a DEA-MONITUR regional tourist competitiveness index in order to compare and rank the total 17 Spanish Autonomous Communities using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Our results show how this performance is very different among regions, and the position of each of the laggard Autonomous Communities should be analysed by their respective destination management organizations (DMOs) in order to envisage adequate corrective measures.
Final deposit of nuclear waste is a a global engineering challenge. The Swedish nuclear industry has spent more than thirty years in investigating the best sites and technologies for the final storage of nuclear waste. Universities have been involved as experts in this massive R&D activity. The result has been a well-documented body of knowledge for decision support. At the same time global research infrastructure networks have been developed. More than 140 PhD theses have been produced as one of the outputs. Eleven of these PhD holders are now full professors. Based on earlier work on research infrastructures Lund, Hamburg, and Kiruna, see for instance Snickars and Falck (2015), we have addressed the question of the role of a technical research infrastructure for the development of fields of engineering and natural science at the same time generating regional development. It has provided an opportunity to empirically study the use of research infrastructure in a specialized technology field. At the same time the study investigates a municipality’s efforts to specialize in research without a university in the vicinity. Do networks of cooperation differ between research groups and research infrastructures? Can a region build its smart specialization on research infrastructure? Can research equipment once belonging to a company be transformed to a public research infrastructure asset? Our results indicate that research infrastructures as the ones in Oskarshamn are powerful creators of international research networks. It is possible although somewhat difficult in view of scattered systems for data provision to assess their academic and societal impacts. Engineering research has its own networks of university-industry and industry-university interaction where value is cogenerated dynamically. In the study we have come some way towards empirically analyzing the networks of research cooperation between industry and university using methods of infrastructure theory and network analysis.
In the long run, tourism competitiveness depends on the sustainable use of territorial assets: the differentiation of destinations depends on the integration of cultural and natural resources into the tourism supply, but also on their preservation over time. The link between competitiveness and sustainability is the staring point for our analysis of the relationships between regional tourism competitiveness, the dynamics of tourism demand and investment and the existence of natural resources and cultural assets in European regions, by using advanced spatial econometric techniques. Despite the close relationship between tourism activities and the characteristics of the territory, the application of methods of spatial analysis methods in tourism studies is still scarce and the results of this work clearly show their potential for this field of research. Among the main findings of this paper, it was observed that natural resources do not have the expected positive impacts on regional tourism competitiveness and that European regions with more abundant natural resources are often developing unsustainable forms of mass tourism, with low value added and scarce benefits for the host communities. The existence of spatial correlation effects suggests that positive spillovers arising from tourism dynamics in neighbourhood regions prevail over potential negative effects related to the competition between destinations. Policy and managerial implications of these results are discussed and further research questions are suggested.