RURAL RETAIL BUSINESS THRESHOLDS AND INTERDEPENDENCIES*

ABSTRACT. The occurrence of rural retail activity may be related to the concept of threshold, which suggests the direct relationship between surrounding populations and the hierarchical functions provided. Empirid studies have typically examined individual categories of retail firm concentration or multiplication in isolation of the extent of other retail activities. This study develops models of retail business concentration for sparsely populated rural markets, and emphasizes proper statistical treatment of the discrete firm-count data. The analytical approach specifies systems of multivariate count data models that can capture the interdependencies among merent types of retail firms. The degree of interdependence is tested and shown to be a significant statistical feature of the model of rural retail firm counts.     

非摩擦经济:网络时代的经济模式与竞争策略

非摩擦经济是不同于传统经济模式的一种低成本、无摩擦、高效率的全新的经济形态。网络经济是一种典型的非摩擦经济。非摩擦经济不仅对传统的经济学理论提出了严峻的挑战,而且以最为鲜明的力量对社会制度、法律、政府和人们的观念形成巨大冲击,尤其是对企业的运作机制和竞争策略提出了更高要求。因此,现代企业应遵循非摩擦经济的运行规律,重视新技术的应用,提升经营理念,以增强竞争能力。     

Localization of Business Services in European Regions: Large Urban Areas Stand Out

The recent increase in business services in terms of both value added and employment has had a positive effect on regional economies, helping them to create a comparative advantage and contributing to the general development of regional productive systems. This heterogeneous set of activities is characterized, among others, by its uneven distribution in the territory. In this paper we aim to identify the key factors that influence the location of business services within the NUTS 2 regions of the European Union. Using a multivariate analytical approach (combining a principal components factor analysis and a multiple linear regression by means of ordinary least squares), four key factors have been identified. In terms of their influence on the location of business services, we can pinpoint the following factors: urban dimension, competitiveness, accessibility and economic dynamism. It was found that business services tend to locate in urban, densely populated and dynamic areas with high levels of competitiveness and easy access.     

THE EFFECT OF THE REGIONAL WIND ON AIR POLLUTION IN HAMILTON, ONTARIO

Summary: By plotting low-volume aerosol counts as indices of pollution in Hamilton a pattern of dual pollution cells of equal intensity centring on the downtown business area and the heavy industrial zone emerges. Pollution levels are twice as great under east winds with accompanying atmospheric stability than for winds from all other sectors. With winds from the easterly sector the industrial pollutants are forced and locked into the lower city. When a major source of industrial pollution disappears, as happened during the 1969 shutdown of the Steel Company of Canada plant, the industrial cell vanishes and the pollution count under east winds drops to a level normal for other wind directions. With a wind change from the east to the west new pollution patterns are formed within six hours. The average pollution count for the city drops substantially but in the east end it increases as the pollution haze formerly trapped in the city is released and carried eastward.     

体验性网络团购对城市商业空间组织的影响

我国网购市场的发展培养了一代网络购物用户和大量服务商,网络团购相应发展,其现实影响有待评估。本研究选择石家庄7网为资料源,应用若干方法探讨一种新型电子商业业态--体验性网络团购对城市商业空间组织的影响,这对优化城市商业布局具有一定意义。文章首先回顾了石家庄市商业格局的演变和团购网站的应用,然后基于街道、产品、成交量等方面的数据,阐述其现实影响。研究发现:①电子商业模式作用下的商业网点空间分布仍然具有很强的区位特征,受基础设施作用而在繁华街道集聚,增强了中心的极化。②给周边地区商业网点带来新的商机,盘活了周边商业空间,进一步证明电子商务的扩散功能。③引发了一种新型商业业态--楼宇经济的崛起,网络团购与楼宇商业形成的良好互动,对城市就业以及通勤都产生长远影响。④零售商业正在追逐电子商务所带来的优势,价格体系、经营方式及商业政策都面临极大挑战,需要营造一种可以保证电子商业良好发展的环境。     

Employment Dynamics,Spatial Restructuring,and the Business Cycle

The multinodal metropolis is an evolving system, affected by both long-term restructuring and by business cycle dynamics. This study of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex points, first, to the multiplicity and wide dispersion of employment centers within the region and, second, to the importance of vintage. During business cycle upswings new centers in new and more dispersed locations receive the preponderant share of new growth. During business cycle downswings, old activities are pruned most heavily from old locations. The result is an increasingly complex array of specialized agglomerations.     

新西兰中国大陆新移民初探

论文基于统计数字,分析了新西兰移民政策对中国大陆移民的影响、中国大陆移民在新西兰的定居状况以及近期新移民的政治诉求。得出结论,新西兰中国大陆新移民群体的形成始于新西兰在1987年所颁布的新移民法案,此后分别于20世纪90年代中期和2000年以后共两次大批的中国大陆人士移民新西兰;近年的新移民包括数以万计的留学生转化的移民以及数额可观的商业移民,尤其是投资移民;如此数万之众的留学生和新移民的到来,对新西兰华人社会经济产生了巨大影响;很多中国大陆新移民对参与新西兰政治表现出了浓厚的兴趣;未来的研究应做多角度和深度研究,如探讨新西兰中国大陆移民的身份认同问题,他们与其他华裔移民及土生华裔的关系以及这个群体中的＂空中飞人＂和海归现象等。     

The firm as citizen? Social responsibility of business in Australia

A model of corporate citizenship is advanced with the help of research on United Kingdom business responses to mass unemployment. This model suggests the need to review our theories of the firm and to widen assumptions about the political role of business. Australian findings, both of the institutionalisation of social responsibility in some large firms and of the emergence of a new sort of business community organisation, fit the citizenship model. Explanations and implications of the findings are considered.     

海外华人产业集群形成机理分析——以佛罗伦萨温商皮具产业集群为例

论文以意大利佛罗伦萨温州商人皮具产业集群为例,从社会网络发展的视角,介绍了佛罗伦萨华人皮具产业集群的概况;阐述了佛罗伦萨温州商人社会网络的形成与发展对当地产业集群形成的作用,探讨了海外华人产业集群的形成机理。研究发现,佛罗伦萨温州商人社会网络不仅培育了新的产业进入者,而且帮助他们迅速进入该集群,从而保持了该集群的旺盛生命力。随着产业集群的成熟,佛罗伦萨温州商人社会网络继续壮大,成为了产业集群内网络组织部分的核心。然而,影响产业集群形成和发展的外在因素甚多,还包括区域位置、历史因素、政策导向等等,因此,关于海外华人产业集群的研究还有待进一步深入探索。     

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN COLLECTIVE OCCUPATIONAL PENSIONS IN BUSINESS IN SCANDINAVIA,CA. 1900–1930

The first three decades of the 20th century marked the beginning of modern collective occupational pensions for salaried business employees in the three Scandinavian countries. Pension premiums were derived from actuarial principles and pension entitlement was financially and legally secured. Relatively few salaried business employees were covered by these new occupational pension schemes until the 1930s. There were similar developments as well as different outcomes in the three countries. In their first three decades, the relative success of such schemes, and the participation of salaried employees in them, seems to have been largest in Denmark and lowest – as well as starting latest – in Norway. The development of occupational pensions in business is compared with Britain and Switzerland as well as with occupational pensions for public employees in the Scandinavian countries; the latter clearly functioning as a model. The new principles for occupational pensions in business, established during and after World War I, proved long lasting and increasingly important. In Norway, defined benefit pension schemes that started in business during World War I were not replaced by defined contribution pension schemes until after 2000.     

多伦多华人商业的发展演变及其社会影响

论文分析了加拿大华人移民构成的变化和地理分布、加拿大多伦多华人商业发展与演变及其理论与社会意义,并以"劳动力市场排斥论""文化差异论"和"多因素相互作用论"等社会学理论解释了为何在多伦多众多的少数民族中,华人经营的商业最为发达、自给程度最高。华人人口的持续增长,促使华人商业出现了与30年前迥然不同的经营模式,既对当地的经济发展做出了很大贡献,也对城市规划和社区生活带来了一定的冲击和影响。而随着移民人数的增加和社会文化的多元化,传统的、单向的"归化"模式已经不合时宜,取而代之的应该是一种新的双向的甚至是多向的"相互融合"的社会发展方式。     

陈云与古籍整理

古籍整理出版,是一项继承和发扬民族文化遗产、关系子孙后代的事业。新中国的古籍整理出版事业发展道路并不平坦,从1953年起步,在“文化大革命”十年浩劫中遭到严重破坏。1976年“文革”结束后,陈云对这一事业非常重视和关心,曾多次发表有关讲话,并于1981年专就古籍整理出版工作发出重要指示,使这一饱受摧残、完全停顿的事业重现生机,取得了前所未有的发展。这对历史文献学的发展,具有十分重要的意义。     

Business Fashion: Masculinity,Class and Dress in 1870s Australia

This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence.     

The business case for a free trade agreement between the European Union and Australia

ABSTRACT

The free trade agreement (FTA) between Australia and the European Union holds the promise of strengthened political collaboration and increasing economic integration. Both Australia and the European Union note increasing bilateral trade and investment. Oftentimes, data does not take current trends in global-value-chain participation for intermediary goods and services movements into account. Behind this sit the cross-border strategies and activities of business entities, whether multinationals or large, small or medium-sized enterprises. This article provides an in-depth investigation of the premise stemming from an FTA for Australian business. What advantages can politics hope to support through a business perspective? What is the global-value-chain part of the story, and what are the business challenges ahead? How can economic policy help shape this FTA to foster a productive bilateral business environment in a geopolitical and geoeconomic context in which regionalisation has taken on new momentum? Specific focus is given to the analysis of the higher education sector and to agriculture. These are two of the leading sectors in this FTA debate. Generating business value means setting negotiation agendas to target tariff and non-tariff barriers to counterbalance ambiguity in the conditions that shape the global business environment.     

Spatiotemporal Modeling of Correlated Small‐Area Outcomes: Analyzing the Shared and Type‐Specific Patterns of Crime and Disorder

This research applies a Bayesian multivariate modeling approach to analyze the spatiotemporal patterns of physical disorder, social disorder, property crime, and violent crime at the small‐area scale. Despite crime and disorder exhibiting similar spatiotemporal patterns, as hypothesized by broken windows and collective efficacy theories, past studies often analyze a single outcome and overlook the correlation structures between multiple crime and disorder types. Accounting for five covariates, the best‐fitting model partitions the residual risk of each crime and disorder type into one spatial shared component, one temporal shared component, and type‐specific spatial, temporal, and space–time components. The shared components capture the underlying spatial pattern and time trend common to all types of crime and disorder. Results show that population size, residential mobility, and the central business district are positively associated with all outcomes. The spatial shared component is found to explain the largest proportion of residual variability for all types of crime and disorder. Spatiotemporal hotspots of crime and disorder are examined to contextualize broken windows theory. Applications of multivariate spatiotemporal modeling with shared components to ecological crime theories and crime prevention policy are discussed.     

Sustainable new economic centres in European metropolitan regions: A stakeholders' perspective

In many European metropolitan regions, new economic centres have emerged at the edge of large cities or in their (post-)suburban areas. This paper explores the possible contribution of these new centres to a more sustainable regional development of European metropolitan regions. The realization of sustainable business parks is even more complicated at 'greenfield' sites than at 'brownfield' sites. With the absence of space scarcity or congestion problems, the temptation to choose easier, less sustainable solutions is hard to resist. Nevertheless, in the Dutch Randstad region, some edge-city and suburban business locations try to meet high sustainability standards. Two case studies in Hoofddorp and Almere illustrate the tough road towards truly sustainable business parks, focusing on the role of the various stakeholders that either encourage or discourage the realization of sustainability potentials.     

THE AIRPORT HOTEL AS BUSINESS SPACE

This article seeks to contribute to debates about the mobile nature of contemporary economic practice, through a discussion of some key themes in the evolution of airport hotels as business spaces. It argues that despite being emblematic of a hypermobile business elite, the nature of hotels as business spaces requires careful unpacking. The article begins by discussing the evolution of the airport hotel, charting the shift from basic lodging standards to recent developments of five star airport hotels. It then seeks to explain the locational geographies of airport hotel development, in response to these new trends. Finally, the article describes how the business traveller is conceived of and (speculatively) catered for by airport hotel operators and designers within a discourse of connectivity, before providing some counter-examples of how such claims fail to address the hotel's place within the complexity of airport spatial organization.     

Rethinking State-Society Relations in Vietnam: The Case of Business Associations in Ho Chi Minh City

The growing private sector in the post-reform Vietnamese economy and its new forms of mobilisation have led to newly emergent social forces that have shaped internal state agendas and political deliberations. With a view to exploring the nature of institutional change in Vietnam, I argue that business associations have played a crucial intermediary role between the state and the private sector over past decades. These associations and the spaces of governance that they constitute are neither characteristic of autonomous actors as suggested by liberal theory nor a form of state corporatism. This paper adopts the “state-in-society” approach, which contends that the state and society should be considered through new governance spaces within the state. These spaces create institutional mechanisms for interaction between the government and business, and provide a framework for deliberative engagement between state and non-state actors. This framework will be tested through an examination of associations of small and medium enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City and their connections to the city authorities. I argue that business associations will be accommodated by the state and will coalesce with existing bureaucratic interests. This proposition contributes to the new research agenda that applies the state-in-society approach to post-socialist institutions.     

Employment Dynamics on Business Estates

The central question of this paper is: “What is the magnitude of different forms of employment dynamics on business estates in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2005 and to what extent are the employment dynamics on business estates different from employment dynamics in general?” In order to answer this question, we examine three kinds of local employment dynamics: (1) entries and exits, (2) inter-municipal relocation and (3) the growth/decline of existing firms. We find that new firm formation and inter-municipal relocation do not lead to employment growth on business estates. However, the in situ employment growth on business estates is higher than the general employment growth in the Netherlands. Therefore, it can be concluded that business estates play an important role in local employment dynamics by facilitating the growth of incumbent firms.     

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR SMALL BUSINESS POLICY

A number of public policy issues have been discussed in this article, the most important of which are: 1. Small business would not need special consideration if our economy were basically a competitive one. 2. A large and growing segment of our economy has sufficient market and political power to make our economy basically non-competitive. 3. Small firms tend to provide price competition, to lead in the development of new products and processes, and to generate new innovations and new employment. 4. Government policy tends to create artificial economies of scale, giving an unwarranted advantage to the very large firm. As a first approximation, a policy of government neutrality on firms of varying size is needed. But, because of discriminations which already exist which favor large firms over small firms, special small business programs may be necessary to provide an equitable policy base. Unfortunately, programs designed to benefit all business, like the investment tax credit, tend to primarily benefit larger firms (Berney, 1979). This is the case for two reasons. First, there is a basic difference in production relationships: large firms tend to be more capital intensive and small firms more labor intensive. Second, the more complex a rule or regulation, the more costly it is for small business to use it. Consequently, even the employment tax credit, which should benefit the small firm is not used by them. Instead, it tends more to benefit the larger firm. Neutrality, as a governmental policy, would appear to demand different treatment for firms of varying size. As an example, the “regulatory flexibility” concept applies different standards to different sized firms so that the burden of regulation is more equitably distributed. The concept of encouraging or requiring financial institutions and other lenders to establish “dual prime rates” is a further example. Since small firms appear to have much higher debt to equity ratios and rely more heavily on shorter-term bank credit, they are more heavily burdened by a tight money policy which forces increases of interest rates. Thus, dual prime rates help to spread the burden of rising interest costs more equally. As many people prefer to work for themselves, equalizing the burden of government policy could only serve to increase the basic growth rate for small business, thus providing an easier start for entrepreneurs and would encourage a more rapid rate of economic growth. None of these discussions, however, argues that small business should be protected from failure. The more efficient firms will succeed and prosper, and the least efficient will not. Many currently successful entrepreneurs learn how to improve their production processes or managerial skills from their failures. What is being recommended as a first step is that government should concentrate on equalizing burdens and benefits in order to achieve true neutrality. If private economies of scale do indeed exist, new firms must grow to survive; what the government should not create are artificial economies of scale with public policy. A strong argument for further action can also be made: it appears that significant external benefits are produced by an economic system with a dynamic small business sector. Since these benefits go to society as a whole rather than entrepreneurs alone in the form of increased profits, a freely operating market without government assistance does not generate as many new small businesses as would be optimal for our society. To internalize the benefits that come from small business, governmental programs need to be devised to increase the rate of return on new, innovative small businesses. Should this happen, we could then anticipate increased rapid rates of innovation and technological change, more rapid rates of employment growth, expanded price competition in all sectors of the economy, and improved export capabilities, in short, true flexibility in our capitalistic system.