Transport Costs and Rural Development

Innovations that reduce costs of transport from rural locations may also reduce transport costs to rural areas. As transport costs fall, producers can afford to concentrate and achieve economies of scale. This paper explains an initially negative, but ultimately positive, relationship between reductions in transport costs and rural development. A two-region general equilibrium model with firm and worker spatial mobility highlights the firm and household location implications of costly transport-service use by both industry and agriculture in the context of scale economies and product differentiation. The computable general equilibrium model is initialized and verified with a bi-regional social accounting matrix and then used for simulations. Changes in relative transport costs are shown to affect relative regional wage rates, thus also determining the location of "production-cost-oriented" firms.     

Interregional Wage Disparities, Relocation Costs, and Labor Mobility in Canada

This paper evaluates possible reasons why interregional wage differences might persist over long periods of time, such as a century or more. A general equilibrium model of interacting regions is developed which can consider explanations including interregional differences in production costs, changes in relocation (migration) costs, and differences in interregional transfer payments. Implications from the model are tested using panel microdata from the Canadian Labour Market Activity Surveys of 1989 and 1990. Key findings are that younger, better educated, native English-speaking workers, who presumably have better information and lower mobility costs, appear to have the smallest interregional wage differences. Thus, because the extent of spatial wage dispersion varies across workers with different characteristics, changes in the pattern of spatial wage disparities over time may be in part a demographic phenomenon.     

Office and Plant Location With Transport Costs of Information

In this paper, under the framework of profit maximization office and plant locations are analyzed, taking into account the existing cost of transporting information between the market and the office, and between the office and the plant. The conclusion is that if the office and the plant are located separately, the value of the unit transmission cost of information on production significantly decreases.     

Big City Labor Markets and Immigrant Economic Performance

Franklin J. James spent much of his career working to understand and improve our metropolitan communities. His interests were varied, ranging from impacts of fiscal and economic distress on urban areas to understanding socioeconomic forces reviving our central cities. During the last several years, Professor James had turned his attention to examining the positive economic impacts immigrants and ethnic communities have for reinvigorating our central cities-and beginning to investigate how non-native American's will impact America's suburbs in metropolitan settings
This preliminary exploration examines destination choices of immigrants, the characteristics of immigrant labor markets, and the determinants of immigrant earnings. The article begins to explore indirect evidence on the economic efficiency with which immigrants and native workers distribute themselves within and among labor markets as well as the assimilation process facing new immigrants. Evidence is presented to explain how the earnings of recent immigrants are affected by their human capital characteristics, their race, and ethnicity, and other factors. We reject the hypothesis that immigrants participate in a tertiary sector of urban labor markets and conclude that the determinants of immigrant earnings are similar enough to those of U.S. natives that it makes sense to assume that they work in the same primary labor market in which most native White Americans work. We find that urban labor markets for immigrants are surprisingly efficient, thus enabling immigrants to take advantage of economic opportunities. A major exception concerns what appears to be a powerful effect of discrimination on the economic progress of Black immigrants.     

Variable Residential Density: Optimum Traffic Density and City Size

In this paper we derive the optimal allocation of land between transportation and housing uses in an outer ring of a circular city, where the net population density is a constant, an exponent-decaying, or a power-decreasing function. We are also able to show that, under these circumstances, at no point in the optimal solution is all the land allocated to transportation use, proof that is, unlike previous work, independent of the solution of the same problem in the inner ring (Central Business District).     

The Size Distribution of Cities and Determinants of City Growth in Turkey

The aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, this study examines the size distribution of cities by using Zipf's law. The second objective of this study is to investigate the effects of determinants of urban growth in Turkey by using the data for the 1980–2007 time period. The main findings of the study show that there is some evidence that Zipf's law holds in Turkey. Moreover, according to the rank-minus-half rule, the results suggest stronger support for Zipf's law in size distribution of the cities. Furthermore, the regression results indicate that fertility rate, location of the city, migration, agglomeration in services and specialization in manufacturing industry have positive impact, whereas schooling rate has a negative effect on growth of the urban population regarding Turkey.     

Regional Specialization and Technical Leapfrogging

This paper investigates circumstances where a region loses its technological leadership after some major technological breakthrough. Input-output linkages between firms in a Cournot upstream industry and a perfectly competitive downstream industry create forces for agglomeration in particular locations, driving up prices of immobile factors. A new technology that is incompatible with the old will not benefit from these linkages and so is more likely to be established in locations with little existing industry due to lower factor prices. Furthermore, in some circumstances the old and new technologies may coexist.     

Regional Labor Market Dynamics, Housing, and Migration

Abstract.  This study explores the impact of plant‐level labor market dynamics and housing markets on gross migration flows. The internal and the external reorganizations of regional labor markets are shown to be related. An increase in internal turnover of jobs and workers in regional labor markets is found to increase net‐migration. This effect arises mainly from a reduction in out‐migration. Housing markets constitute constraints for migration. In particular, an increase in regional housing prices and a large share of owner‐occupancy housing discourages net‐migration to a region by reducing in‐migration. In contrast, the out‐migration rate remains largely unaffected by housing markets.     

Coming Through a City Near You: The Transport of Hazardous Wastes

Current figures (compiled in 1995) indicate that hazardous waste transporters (19,567 in number) ship approximately 16 million tons of hazardous waste annually in the United States (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1995). While some state and local governments have enacted hazardous waste transport regulations for the protection of their citizens, the federal government has had primacy in initiating and setting the course of hazardous waste transport regulation. As a result, the predominant perspective on hazardous waste transport has been technical in orientation. This paper identifies and discusses how this technical perspective and the social perspective differ and what the consequences are for government policies and actions regarding hazardous waste transport.     

Scientific Credibility,Disagreement, and Error Costs in 17 Biotechnology Policy Subsystems

One of the original objectives of the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was to shed light on the role of science in policymaking. The ACF depicts subsystem scientists as political actors just like any other. Unfortunately, science has never become a major theme of research within the framework and, as a consequence, its role in policymaking remains under‐theorized, leaving ample room for interpretation. This article seeks to explore the validity of three propositions about the role of science in policy. The first two are derived from the ACF: (i) the capacity of scientists to provide credible advice is affected by the harshness of the political debates dividing the policy subsystem; and (ii) agreement among scientists is just as common as among other groupings of policy actors. The third is derived from an “error costs” argument: (iii) Disagreements among scientists are even more pronounced than disagreements among other policy actors. Using the results of a survey of policy actors in 17 biotechnology subsystems, this article finds support for the first and third propositions. Indeed, scientists' participation in political divisions might even be underestimated by the ACF. The article concludes with attempts to clarify the role of scientists within the ACF, including discussions of ambiguity regarding the role of professional forums and of scientists in between‐coalition learning within policy subsystems.     

NAFTA's Labor Side Agreement and International Labor Solidarity

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its supplemental labor pact, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) reflect the uneven advances of labor rights advocacy in connection with international trade. NAFTA provides extensive rights and protections for multinational firms and investors in such areas as intellectual property rights and investment guarantees. The NAALC only partially addresses labor rights and labor conditions, but within its limits it has shown itself to be a viable tool for cross-border solidarity among key actors in the trade union, human rights, and allied movements. The NAALC's principles and complaint mechanisms create new space for advocates to build coalitions and take concrete action to articulate challenges to the status quo and advance workers' interests. Cooperation, consultation, and collaboration among social actors have brought a qualitative change to transnational labor rights networks in North America.     

Pattern Analysis Based on Type, Orientation, Size, and Shape

Quantifying the pattern of geographically defined areas has proven useful in analyzing and understanding geographic processes. Pattern analyses most commonly used by geographers measure the spatial distribution of nonspatial variables at each point or in each area. The objective of this research is to develop and assess a pattern analysis for area-class maps that considers more than the nonspatial attributes when describing a spatial pattern. We examine whether similar geographic areas—similar with respect to attribute type and several geometric properties—exhibit particular spatial patterns (e.g., clustered, random, or dispersed). The additional attributes we include are orientation, size, and shape. We refer to the method as TOSS, reflecting the T ype, O rientation, S ize, and S hape of areas. The goal of considering these additional attributes is to capture the geometric aspects of pattern that other approaches to pattern analysis do not. Sets or groups of similar areas are created using cluster analysis, based on a variable standardization score using the Gower coefficient of similarity. The spatial distributions for each set of geographic objects are then calculated using nearest neighbor analysis. To test the effectiveness of the TOSS method, results from pattern analysis and the TOSS method are qualitatively and quantitatively compared. The TOSS method offers a novel approach to pattern analysis.     

Rubber and Carbon: Opportunity Costs,Incentives and Ecosystem Services in Acre,Brazil

The concept of ‘opportunity costs’ has been important in theoretical discussions of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). It focuses attention on economic trade-offs of individual landholders and can make providing ecosystem services, such as tropical forest carbon sequestration, appear to be a cost-effective way to reduce near-term carbon emissions. Yet in practice, the concept may be less useful. This article examines how a programme in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, has moved away from the concept of opportunity costs, challenging its theoretical importance. Instead of payments, the Acre programme offers ‘incentives’ intended to make rural people produce more whilst deforesting less. It resonates with the neoliberal commodification of carbon and the dominant valorization of intensive agriculture. Yet it also enlists lessons from Acre's history of rubber production and its rubber tapper-led social movement, namely that the living forest can be monetarily valuable and that its use can facilitate its protection. This article shows how local history and culture can be used to reshape PES.