Spatial Agglomeration of Manufacturing in Greece: Sectoral Patterns and Determinants

This article aims to demonstrate how the industry characteristics of manufacturing sectors affect the patterns of their spatial agglomeration. It also addresses several intricate issues concerning the measurement of localization economies and estimation of their main determinants in manufacturing industries. The original empirical analysis employs annual industrial data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) during the period 1993–2006 in Greece at the prefecture level, i.e. for 51 prefectures. The data processing reveals three important findings. The first is the temporal persistence of localization economies in the Greek manufacturing. The second refers to the high level of agglomeration associated with the high-technology industries as well as the resource- and scale-intensive industries. Lastly, there are significant effects of industry characteristics related to knowledge externalities, labour skills and productivity, scale economies and own-transport expenditure on spatial agglomeration, as resulted from the use of alternative geographic concentration indices and panel data models. Results obtained have implications for policy-makers, who can enhance the regional manufacturing activity by affecting these industry-specific factors. Amongst others, planning measures and policies which aim at promoting the local development and regional convergence should focus on reducing transport costs for firms or sectors, by improving the infrastructure capacity, interconnectivity and quality of services.     

网络关系嵌入、创新扩散与旅游企业创新绩效

作为服务业创新的重要分支,旅游业创新研究还处于起步阶段,旅游企业创新绩效及其影响机制研究还很缺乏。本文以嵌入性理论为切入点,构建了旅游企业网络关系嵌入与创新绩效之间关系的理论模型,并以四川剑门蜀道核心景区（剑门关）周边旅游企业为样本,运用回归模型实证研究了关系嵌入性如何通过创新扩散来影响旅游企业创新绩效。研究结果显示：旅游企业网络的强关系有利于提升企业的创新绩效,企业间互惠程度和关系的持久性与创新绩效正相关,创新扩散在旅游企业关系嵌入和创新绩效关系中起部分中介作用。     

Sectoral Resilience: Conceptualizing Industry-Specific Spatial Patterns of Interactive Crisis Adjustment

While the regional resilience approach stresses major place-specific factors of adaptability to economic crises, industry-sector-specific mechanisms of shock response, which often cross-regional boundaries, still require conceptualization relating to aspects of resilience. This paper proposes the concept of sectoral resilience, which acknowledges that the actors who constitute the value chains and production systems of an industry sector, when struck by a major global crisis, collectively and interactively form a sector-specific pattern of response and adaptation. As these actors often strategically use assets at different locations, industry-specific spatial patterns of adaptation emerge that affect various regions in differing ways. After defining the suggested concept and related terminology, its geographical logics are outlined. Then major conceptual pillars of sectoral resilience are depicted, relating to six major, partly interdependent process fields. For each of them, mechanisms of shock adaptation of an industry sector and major factors of inter-sectoral distinctions of resilience patterns are pointed out, briefly illustrated by the examples of the automotive and mechanical engineering sectors. The approach helps us better understand industry-specific features of crisis adaptation and intersections of regional and corporate logics of resilience.     

A Spatial Mixture Model of Innovation Diffusion

The diffusion of new product or technical innovation over space is here modeled as an event‐based process in which the likelihood of the next adopter being in region r is influenced by two factors: (i) the potential interactions of individuals in r with current adopters in neighboring regions, and (ii) all other attributes of individuals in r that may influence their adoption propensity. The first factor is characterized by a logit model reflecting the likelihood of adoption due to spatial contacts with previous adopters, and the second by a logit model reflecting the likelihood of adoption due to other intrinsic effects. The resulting spatial diffusion process is then assumed to be driven by a probabilistic mixture of the two. A number of formal properties of this model are analyzed, including its asymptotic behavior. But the main analytical focus is on statistical estimation of parameters. Here it is shown that standard maximum‐likelihood estimates require large sample sizes to achieve reasonable results. Two estimation approaches are developed which yield more sensible results for small sample sizes. These results are applied to a small data set involving the adoption of a new Internet grocery‐shopping service by consumers in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.     

Sectoral Versus Territorial Regional Planning and Development in Norway

New regional policies in Norway and many other countries try to empower their regions through creating a balance between central governing with emphasis on redistribution of activities and resources, and local mobilization with emphasis on self reliance, innovation and learning by doing. In Norway municipalities and counties have for a long period had this double function, but we now see that the vertical policy of implementing national welfare policy has grown and become dominant. As a consequence, the horizontal policy of social mobilization has been neglected, and has to some extent been taken over by inter-municipal and interregional organizations. Normally, these organizations are in practice organized as regional development agencies. They seem to be vulnerable political institutions that seek legitimacy from--and need acceptance and support from--both territorial and sectoral governments. The regional planning process is regarded as an important tool in their political institution building process. In this paper I want to explain how regional planning and institution building in Norway in practice have moved towards a two-parallel system.     

偃师二里头遗址的都城空间结构及其特征

在最新考古发掘报告与前贤时俊研究的基础上,分析了偃师二里头遗址的都城空间结构及其特征。二里头都城的选址经过了周密的考虑。都城布局经过统一规划,属于单一城制即单一宫城形态的都城,其规划采取了按功能划分为不同分区的结构方法。宫城是一种"非城郭形态"的宫城,具有多宫城性质。二里头都城空间的形成大体经过四个阶段。都城空间的演变过程及其阶段性特征,与夏王朝的历史发展密切相关,是其时社会发展在都城空间领域的集中反映。二里头遗址是我国古代最早的具有明确规划的都城,后世中国古代都城营建制度的许多方面都可以追溯至二里头都城。     

System Innovation in Spatial Development: Current Dutch Approaches

A system innovation is a cross-organizational qualitative intervention that various system participants bring about together through their various contributions of different kinds of knowledge and skill. The term refers to the innovation of an entire system involving many actors. Spatial development refers to both the dynamic in land use, and changes in the development and implementation of spatial plans. The current large number of societal and spatial developments taken as a whole in a country such as the Netherlands increase the pressure on space and create the need for a powerful system innovation. This paper explains the system innovation which is going on in the Netherlands now, drawing on such themes as the coproduction of policy, public–private partnership and demand management. A process architecture for area development is more and more proposed, in which project envelopes are formed, the scope is optimized and surplus profits are ploughed back into the area (value capturing). The future will tell whether this new approach will really work and whether the traditional values and performance of Dutch spatial planning will be safeguarded under changing circumstances.     

Characteristics of Collaboration in Product Innovation in the Regional System of Innovation of East Gothia

The focus of this article is on product innovations introduced by firms (establishments) and the collaborations they enter into with other firms and organizations in carrying out this activity. The theoretical framework combines innovation theories with the literature on regional innovation systems and the knowledge-based economy. Empirically we have investigated characteristics of collaboration among manufacturing establishments in the region of East Gothia in Sweden, with specific focus on the number of employees involved in the innovation projects, mechanisms of knowledge transfer between organizations, as well as financing and patenting in relation to product innovations.     

Sectoral Sources of the Massachusetts Miracle and Other Turning Points

Previous analyses of the Massachusetts Miracle and the subsequent evolution of employment in the area have centered in part on sectoral explanations. In this paper these explanations are evaluated with the use of a sectoral-based VAR model of the Boston economy, developed to identify local and national sectoral shocks. The relative importance of these shocks is estimated both for the overall sample and at several turning points in aggregate Boston employment, the latter using historical decompostions.     

Innovation and Destination Governance in Denmark: Tourism,Policy Networks and Spatial Development

Abstract

For more than a decade, tourist destinations in Denmark have experienced decreasing market shares and numbers of international visitors in comparison with the early 1990s. Despite this stagnation, destination development initiatives and national tourism policies have continued largely unaltered, relying on traditional efforts like collective marketing and local visitor information services, while giving limited priority to innovation-oriented measures that could improve the international attractiveness of Danish destinations by renewing the tourist experiences available. The article argues (1) that important reasons for the slow adoption of new destination development strategies can be found in the domination of tourism-related policy networks by short-term sectoral and localist interests, and (2) that recent reforms of subnational and sectoral governance have only improved the prospects of introduction of more innovation-oriented destination development policies to a limited extent.     

Spatial Characteristics and Comparisons of Interaction and Median Clustering Models

Cluster analysis has been pursued from a number of directions for identifying interesting relationships and patterns in spatial information. A major emphasis is currently on the development and refinement of optimization‐based clustering models for the purpose of exploring spatially referenced data. Within this context, two basic methods exist for identifying clusters that are most similar. An interesting feature of these two approaches is that one method approximates the relationships inherent in the other method. This is significant given that the approximation approach is invariably utilized for cluster detection in spatial and aspatial analysis. A number of spatial applications are investigated which highlight the differences in clusters produced by each model. This is an important contribution because the differences are in fact quite significant, yet these contrasts are not widely known or acknowledged.     

Relational creativity and improvisation in contemporary dance

ABSTRACT

In a study combining methodological elements from cognitive psychology and social anthropology, we worked with professional contemporary dancers making choreographic movement material to investigate the effects of working with others during improvisation. Dancers improvised alone, in pairs, and in a trio, they self-reported the number of new movement ideas created within two and four minutes, and self-rated ease, interest, originality, and clarity. Within two minutes, higher ratings were assigned in the unfamiliar pair than the familiar pair condition but there was no effect of group size on the number of ideas created. Within four minutes, more ideas were created in the solo condition than the pair condition with no effect of group size on ratings. Open-ended responses suggested that the quality and relevance of the ideas increased in the duo and the trio conditions. The conclusions point to emergent aspects of relations between persons as fundamental to creativity.     

Of Vines and Policy Vignettes: Sectoral Evolution and Institutional Thickness in the Languedoc

We argue that the search for rural regimes in particular localities can be usefully advanced through the deployment of a sensitive and suitably nuanced conceptualization of institutional thickness. Empirical validation of this theoretical framework with reference to Languedoc viticulture offers substantial evidence of the interdependency between regime building maintenance and stability, and local institutional integrity. The theoretical framework developed here, based on the notions of consensus and concrete institutions , also provides an analytically rigorous approach for understanding the complex rescaling of the political economy of rural governance, not least by offering some indication of the scalar rationale for consensus compatibility and partnership building between elites situated at different politico-geographic scales. We contend that an understanding of this shared logic of action among local and extra-local administrative and political elites is crucial to the restructuring process unfolding in European rural regions.     

中国旅游创新与旅游经济增长关系研究——基于空间面板数据模型

本文运用空间面板数据模型,选用1998～2009年数据研究了中国省域旅游创新与旅游经济增长的关系,发现：中国省域旅游创新与旅游经济增长呈现显著空间集聚性;旅游创新不仅推动当地旅游经济的增长,还通过空间传导机制对邻近区域的旅游经济产生正向的溢出效应。说明应充分重视创新在旅游经济增长中的积极作用,通过旅游创新成果的溢出效应扩大旅游创新对旅游经济增长的作用程度和范围。     

Competition in Research Activity among Economic Departments: Evidence by Negative Spatial Autocorrelation

Despite the prevalence of both competitive forces and patterns of collaboration within academic communities, studies on research productivity generally treat universities as independent entities. By exploring the research productivity of all academic economists employed at 81 universities and 17 economic research institutes in Austria, Germany, and German‐speaking Switzerland, this study finds that a research unit's productivity negatively depends on that of neighboring research units weighted by inverse distances. This significant and exemplary robust negative relationship is compatible with the notion of competition for priority of discovery among individual researchers and the universities that employ them, and with the notion that the willingness to relocate decreases with distance. In addition, the empirical results support the hypotheses that collaboration and that the existence of economies of scale increase research productivity. A pesar de la existencia de tanto fuerzas de competencia como de patrones de colaboración dentro de la comunidad académica, los estudios sobre la productividad de investigación tratan por lo general a las universidades como entidades independientes. El presente estudio explora la productividad de investigación de todos los economistas académicos empleados en 81 universidades y 17 institutos de investigación económica en Austria, Alemania y Suiza germano‐parlante, y concluye que la productividad de una unidad de investigación depende negativamente de la productividad de las unidades vecinas ponderada por las distancias inversas que las separan. Esta relación negativa es robusta, significativa y emblemática, lo cual concuerda con el concepto de competencia por prioridad de descubrimiento (priority of discovery) entre investigadores individuales y entre las universidades que los emplean. Así mismo concuerda con la idea de que la voluntad de desplazarse disminuye con la distancia. Adicionalmente, los resultados empíricos de este estudio apoyan la hipótesis de que la colaboración y la presencia de economías de escala tienen un efecto positivo sobre (incrementan) la productividad de investigación. 尽管对学术团体的研究主要针对竞争力和合作模式,但在研究科研生产率时,大学仍被视为独立的实体。本文通过调查奥地利、德国和瑞士德语区的81所高校和17个经济研究单位经济学家的研究产出率,研究发现一个研究单位的产出效率高低负依赖于反距离加权相邻研究单位的研究产出率。这种重要且典型稳健的负相关关系与个人研究者及其所在大学关于发现优先权的竞争观念相符,同时也与研究者的调动意愿因距离增加而减少的情况相一致。此外,经验结果也支持了合作和规模经济的存在能提高研究产出率的假设。