THE IMMIGRATION SURPLUS REVISITED IN A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL WITH ENDOGENOUS GROWTH*

ABSTRACT We revisit the influential work of Borjas (1995) on the economic gain to the host population from immigration—“the immigration surplus.” We develop his analysis by using a general equilibrium endogenous growth model with endogenous capital and several sectors, including an R&D sector driving growth. Skilled immigration leads to a bigger R&D sector share resulting in higher long‐term growth. If skilled labor and physical capital are complements, this growth gain increases. Growth effects on the immigration surplus dominate the purely static effects of Borjas, but are not sufficient to eliminate the emergence of losers (skilled natives) within the host population.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

LOCAL INPUT AND PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN U.S. MANUFACTURING: 1972–2002*

ABSTRACT This research analyzes manufacturing growth and decline across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions during the 1972–2002 period. We decompose real value added growth across local labor market areas in the lower 48 U.S. states into contributions from labor, capital, and total factor productivity. We then estimate a model describing the long‐run growth of labor, capital, and productivity and find that increased productivity increases the growth of labor and capital, as well as a positive correlation between labor and capital stock growth. We also find evidence that human capital investment and agglomeration economies encourage productivity growth, while unionization discourages it.     

Social capital determinants and labor market networks

We explore the links between determinants of social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer–employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on neighborhood homogeneity that has previously been tied to social capital, and new data—not previously used in the study of social capital—on the number and location of nonprofit sector establishments at the neighborhood level. We use a machine learning algorithm to identify the potential determinants of social capital that best predict neighborhood‐level variation in labor market networks. We find evidence suggesting that smaller and less centralized schools, and schools with fewer poor students, foster social capital that builds local labor market networks, as does a larger Republican vote share. The presence of establishments in a number of nonprofit‐oriented industries are identified as predictive of strong labor market networks, likely because they either provide public goods or facilitate social contacts. These industries include, for example, churches and other religious institutions, fire and rescue services including volunteer fire departments, country clubs and golf courses, labor unions, chamber music groups, hobby clubs, and schools.     

新中国成立初期的劳资协商会议制度——以郑州市为例

劳资协商会议是党和政府调解劳资关系的重要制度,它以“发展生产,繁荣经济,公私兼顾,劳资两利”为基本原则,对调解劳资关系、恢复发展经济起到了积极作用。根据中央和河南省的指示精神,1950年,郑州市积极设立劳资协商会议,为私营工商业发展做出了贡献。“五反”运动后,郑州市的劳资协商会议对缓和劳资关系、恢复生产、稳定社会秩序起到了一定的作用。     

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN THE OLD AND NEW EUROPE: THE ROLE OF AGGLOMERATION EXTERNALITIES

As Europe is currently characterized by huge disparities in the economic performance of “old” and “new” states, we investigate whether this is the result of local agglomeration—specialization and diversity—externalities. Our spatial econometric analysis focuses on total factor productivity dynamics over the period 1996–2007 for 13 industries located in 276 European regions. Consistently with the “nursery cities” theory, we find that diversity exerts a positive effect in the knowledge‐intensive services of the “old” Europe urban areas, while specialization is still effective in the “new” Europe low‐tech manufacturing. Human and technological capital has also a positive impact.     

Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners—usually indigenous communities—to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.     

MEASURING CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO INTERREGIONAL AGRICULTURAL LABOR PRODUCTIVITY DIFFERENTIALS: A JOINT PROFIT FORMULATION*

ABSTRACT Using Taylor series approximations of joint profit functions, a methodology is outlined to quantify interregional differentials in the Canadian agriculture sector by region and to quantify the contributing factors to regional labor productivity differences. These contributing factors are output price differentials–both crop and livestock, differentials in “land and buildings” capital deepening, “other” capital deepening, energy prices, other material prices, and efficiency. The joint profit formulation permits the analysis of effects of regional specific output price and output mix differentials.     

Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy

This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that: ?Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities. ?Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups. ?The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous. ?Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market. ?The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.     

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF FIRMS AND SKILLED LABOR*

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between firm location and skilled‐labor location. While existing new economic geography (NEG) models could not explicitly analyze the relationship due to their assumptions, I construct a new NEG‐type model allowing for different location dynamics of firms and skilled labor for this objective. The main results are as follows. First, a relatively large pool of skilled labor attracts firms when trade costs are small, while it might repel firms when trade costs are sufficiently large. Second, assuming that skilled workers are mobile between regions, the model shows that skilled workers agglomerate faster than firms with decreasing trade costs. Third, the model supports the hypothesis that firms follow skilled labor rather than the reverse. These results are consistent to Indian and Chinese experiences, and some “creative‐class” or “skilled‐city” stories.     

Nature,Capital and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?

Abstract: The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi‐national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved—land, labor and money—and the always‐uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.     

Anchoring of Firms in the Neighbourhood: Does Local Social and Physical Order Affect Local Firms' Investment Strategies?

An increasing number of small- and medium-sized firms, whose low relocation propensity seems to point to strong local anchors, have moved to residential neighbourhoods. On the one hand, the neighbourhood context, an attractive production milieu with rich social network potential, may enable entrepreneurs to increase investments in either human capital (personnel) or physical capital (premises, production goods). These investments further anchor firms in a neighbourhood, where they contribute to a thriving local economy. On the other hand, high crime rates, a deteriorated physical environment and a lack of social capital can discourage entrepreneurs from investing locally. In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis on the relative contribution of neighbourhood characteristics to entrepreneurial investment strategies and controlled for firm and entrepreneur characteristics. We found that neighbourhood cohesiveness and liveability—but not local market characteristics—make a small but significant contribution to explaining local entrepreneurs' investments. This contribution is even stronger for the smallest firms. Therefore, a spatially targeted policy aimed at improving social cohesion and safety is likely to benefit both residents and small local firms.     

DO PRODUCER SERVICES INDUCE REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?*

Goods production and services have become increasingly integrated within a flexible, information-oriented system of production organization. In this context, it is argued here that producer services–carried out both within manufacturing firms and by “independent” enterprises–play a pivotal role in expanding the division of labor, productivity, and per capita income. This proposition is supported by results of an empirical analysis of metropolitan areas in major U.S. regions and in the nation as a whole.     

Are there differences in social capital related to corporate regional engagement in dynamic and less dynamic non-core regions?

ABSTRACT

This article explores corporate regional engagement and related social capital in non-core regions. Corporate regional engagement comprises various activities of firms to influence regional contexts, which are challenging in non-core regions (e.g. on account of their organizational or institutional thinness). Corporate regional engagement engenders positive effects for regional development when firms collaborate among themselves (bonding social capital) and with other actors (bridging social capital) to improve regional endowments. We assume that dynamic regions have at their disposal higher levels of inclusive social capital in terms of collaboration networks for regional concerns and trust, while less dynamic regions have more exclusive and fragmented social capital. Consequently, less dynamic regions in particular appear to have potential to develop in a more social sense by activating the endogenous potential of region-wide collaboration. Those assumptions are tested based on a survey with Chief Executive Officers from the manufacturing industry from three dynamic and three less dynamic Swiss regions. The findings show that in dynamic regions, more firms are members of regional cross-industry associations, favouring regional collaboration; in less dynamic regions, meanwhile, more firms are members of industry-specific associations and service clubs, where benefits seem to be higher for individual firms than for the regional business environment.     

Labor's Geography: Capital,Violence, Guest Workers and the Post‐World War II Landscape

Abstract: The impetus to labor geography—putting workers and their practices and interests right at the heart of our analyses and making these ontologically prior in our theorizing—is the right one. Because this is the right impulse, work in labor geography has tended to over‐valorize both the ability of workers to shape the landscapes of capitalism and the long‐term efficacy of any such “shaping”. Arguing from a specific case—the struggles over agribusiness in California in the immediate post‐World War II California—this paper seeks to understand those moments when workers are all but powerless. It argues that those of us interested in politically charged and politically efficacious labor geographies need to retrain our focus as much on the structures within which workers live and work as well as on the actions undertaken by powerful forces within capital and the state whose interests are served by various forms of worker powerlessness.     

From the School Yard to the Conservation Area: Impact Investment across the Nature/Social Divide

In the face of planetary crises, from inequality to biodiversity loss, “impact investing” has emerged as a vision for a new, “moral” financial system where investor dollars fund socio-environmental repair while simultaneously generating financial returns. In support of this system elite actors have formed a consensus that financial investments can have beneficial, more-than-financial outcomes aimed at solving social and environmental crises. Yet critical geographers have largely studied “green” and “social” finance separately. We propose, instead, a holistic geography of impact investing that highlights the common methods used in attempts to offset destructive investments with purportedly reparative ones. This involves interrogating how elite-led ideas of social and environmental progress are reflected in investments, as well as deconstructing the “objects” of impact investments. As examples, we use insights from both “green” and “social” literatures to analyse the social values embedded in projects of financialisation in schooling and affordable housing in the US.     

Eating, Cooking, and Shanghai's "Less-than-Manly Men”: The Social Consequences of Food Rationing and Economic Reforms

This study examines some social consequences of food rationing and economic reforms in Shanghai by considering the notion of “Shanghai little men” (a broader translation of which is “Shanghai less-than-manly men”). Male Shanghainese are notorious for doing household labor and being obedient to their wives, which has earned them the nickname Shanghai little men. This study indicates that their grocery shopping and cooking were first inspired by fundamental changes in food distribution and the power structure during the 1950s and 1960s. It treats Shanghai little men as both a special group and a symbol of certain changes in gender roles at home and the redefining of gender norms in the larger society. It examines the shifting discourse concerning Shanghai little men in the era of economic reforms and analyzes a recent popular discourse about “seeking real men” and “being real women.” Finally, it deconstructs the current cultural nostalgia for traditional gender-defined divisions of labor, reflecting a parallel developmen—the “transnational business masculinity” that one sees in China.     

WHAT DRIVES THE URBAN WAGE PREMIUM? EVIDENCE ALONG THE WAGE DISTRIBUTION

This paper aims at disentangling the role played by different explanations on the urban wage premium along the wage distribution. We analyze the wage dynamics of migrants from lower to higher density areas in Italy, using quantile regressions and individual data. The results show that unskilled workers benefit more from a wage premium accruing over time, while skilled workers enjoy a wage premium when they migrate as well as a wage increase over time. Further, we find that for unskilled workers the wage growth over time is mainly due to human capital accumulation in line with the “learning” hypothesis, while for skilled workers the wage growth is mainly explained by the “coordination” hypothesis, i.e., cities enhance the probability of better matches between workers and firms.     

Gaming on the edge: Mobile labour and global talent in Atlantic Canada's video game industry

Diminishing returns and advances in telecommunications have prompted large video game firms to seek new locations, outsource production, and develop niche studios, including on Canada's East Coast. In this paper, we examine emerging occupational cultures and trace the origins and evolution of video game production in Canada's Atlantic provinces—a critical yet peripheral space economy in the gaming sector. Our findings are drawn from 30 interviews with gameworkers, studio managers, government officials, and other industry experts. We find this industry to be driven by the confluence of three major factors: (i) provincial governments have supported video game development as a strategic industry via financial incentives; (ii) firms are benefiting from a return migration effect and are repatriating Atlantic Canadian talent from media hubs by selling “home,” work‐life balance, and an alternative to the punishing gamework culture associated with Silicon Valley; and (iii) post‐secondary institutions in the region have improved their talent pipelines through computer science, digital media, and video game development programs.     

关于“尧都平阳”历史地望的再探讨——兼与王尚义先生商榷

史籍所见尧都之“平阳”是一个地理区域概念。“平阳”在今山西临汾市西南一带是可以肯定的。“王文”所采信的皇甫谧《帝王世纪》“帝尧始封于唐, 有徙晋阳, 及为天子, 都平阳。平阳即今晋阳, 即太原也”之说法根本就是错误的。考古学提供的一条重要线索, 陶寺遗址的地理位置与古文献记载的“尧都”地望相合, 其放射性碳素年代 (距今4200—4400年之间) 也与古史传说中“陶唐氏”兴盛的年代基本一致。先秦“太原”指晋南, 现在的太原是战国末期才出现的地名。太原始称晋阳则是汉以后的事。太原之“晋阳”没有早于春秋之前的考古发现。太原之“晋阳”与唐叔虞之封地无涉, 与“尧都平阳”更无涉。今临汾塔儿山周围的汾浍平原地带就是当年“唐尧”统治的“唐国”属地, 其“帝都”之墟当为今考古发现的山西襄汾之陶寺遗址。