WHAT DO BUSINESS CLIMATE INDEXES TEACH US ABOUT STATE POLICY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH?*

ABSTRACT State business climate indexes capture state policies that might affect economic growth. State rankings in these indexes vary wildly, raising questions about what the indexes measure and which policies are important for growth. Indexes focused on productivity do not predict economic growth, while indexes emphasizing taxes and costs predict growth of employment, wages, and output. Analysis of sub‐indexes of the tax‐and‐cost‐related indexes points to two policy factors associated with faster growth: less spending on welfare and transfer payments; and more uniform and simpler corporate tax structures. But factors beyond the control of policy have a stronger relationship with economic growth.     

Government institutions and the dynamics of urban growth in China

Economic growth in China in recent decades has largely rested on the dynamism of its cities. High economic growth has coincided with measures aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments and with a mounting political drive to curb corruption. Yet the connection between government institutions and urban growth in China remains poorly understood. This paper is the first to look into the link between government efficiency and corruption, on the one hand, and urban growth in China, on the other hand and to assess what is the role of institutions relative to more traditional factors for economic growth in Chinese cities. Using panel data for 283 cities over the period between 2003 and 2014, the results show that the urban growth in China is a consequence of a combination of favorable human capital, innovation, density, local conditions, foreign direct investment, and city‐level government institutions. Both government quality—especially for those cities with the best governments—and the fight against corruption at the city level have a direct effect on urban growth. Measures to tackle corruption at the provincial level matter in a more indirect way, by raising or lowering the returns of other growth‐inducing factors.     

Whose Wealth Is It Anyway? Mozambique's Outstanding Economic Growth with Worsening Rural Poverty

Despite rapid economic growth and massive inflows of aid, rural poverty in Mozambique is worsening. Agricultural production and productivity have not increased in the last decade. Use of chemical fertilizers and other modern technology is at a low level and decreasing. The present development model emphasizes that the role of government and donors is to provide human capital and infrastructure, while the private sector is responsible for economic development and ending poverty. The most recent national surveys confirm what is being seen elsewhere in Africa — that this non‐interventionist strategy does not raise agricultural productivity or reduce poverty. While 80 per cent of Mozambique's population is engaged in agriculture, this sector contributes only 20 per cent of GDP. This suggests that investments in agriculture are likely to generate pro‐poor growth, both to rural and urban dwellers. This policy failure is increasingly recognized, but donors and government have invested too much political capital in the current policy to change easily.     

THE GREEN ECONOMY AND POST‐GROWTH REGIMES: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

While mainstream economic geography is doing increasing research on green manufacturing and services, with a few notable exceptions, its predominant conceptual approaches to emerging modes of economic orientation continue to examine economic transitions somewhat unreflexively within the context of traditional growth paradigms. The aim of this article is to explore and critically examine neoliberal discourses on the green economy and smart growth by exploring contributions to debates on green economics proposed by ideas linked to post‐growth economies. Based on studies by scholars such as Tim Jackson and Serge Latouche, the article examines the contours of debates on post‐growth, décroissance (de‐growth) and prosperity without growth. We begin by examining growth debates and existing contributions by economic and other geographers to the exploration of alternatives to conventional growth‐centred economics. We then identify some emergent spatial facets of post‐growth transitions and utilize these to explore potential research topics and opportunities for empirical and conceptual contributions by economic geographers to academic and societal debates on economic transitions and post‐growth paradigms. Particular attention is paid to approaches currently discussed in economic geography, such as socio‐technical transition studies.     

Urban,Suburban, and Exurban Sprawl in the Rocky Mountain West: Evidence from Regional Adjustment Models*

Abstract. This article adapts a regional adjustment model to examine land use change in the Rocky Mountain West region of the United States. Three interrelated questions motivate the research. How does the proliferation of urban, suburban, and exurban sprawl in the Rocky Mountain West relate to the population and employment growth process? Are population and employment endogenously determined there? And what does this imply for the sustainability of economic development in the region? Through a series of regional adjustment models, the empirical analysis links population and employment growth in the Rocky Mountain West to explicit spatial outcomes and delivers substantive evidence of endogeneity between the two. The results suggest that the long‐term prosperity of the region depends on the preservation of the high quality of life it offers, and that greater intergovernmental coordination, careful infrastructure planning, and attention to the character of its economic structure may help to accomplish this. Future research should focus on looking deeper into certain explanatory variables used in this analysis and on developing a better picture of what the spatial equilibrium that regional adjustment models emulate may look like.     

The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia

There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the ‘amenity’ of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises ‘amenity’ in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio‐economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south‐east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in‐migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro‐scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in‐migration rates has increased substantially between 1976–1981 and 1996–2001.     

THE ART OF NEOLIBERALIZING PARK MANAGEMENT: COMMODIFICATION,POLITICS AND HOTEL CONSTRUCTION IN PALLASYLLÄSTUNTURI NATIONAL PARK,FINLAND

Following the growth of nature‐based tourism, national parks and other protected areas have become important tourist attractions. This article examines the legislative process of revising the Act on Pallas‐Yllästunturi National Park, located in northern Finland, to enable the renovation and enlargement of the old hotel. The first draft of the government bill published in 2008 led to widespread public opposition, and thus, construction rights were reduced substantially before the new Act was passed in 2010. The main question of this article is why the Finnish government changed its policy on national park governance that had existed for decades. We assess the extent to which the changes in park governance can be interpreted as part of the worldwide neoliberalization of nature, as well as what kind of forces and values work against neoliberal management ideologies. We examine how the process of revising the Act proceeded in the Parliament and analyse on what grounds the hotel construction was defended and opposed in the discussions. Finally we ponder how the political disagreements are explained by neoliberal frames. We conclude that the neoliberal element was one part of the process, but it intertwined with local political reality creating results hardly resembling textbook definitions of neoliberal or classic liberal ideals. Mixed ideological principles, contextual economic conditions, and complex dependencies between individual actors create cases which must be analysed carefully to find out if neoliberal elements really exist and how they are transformed. Close relations between economic and political actors and creation of economic monopolies should raise doubts if vocabulary of liberalization is just a disguise of actions supporting hidden political and economic interests.     

The return of economic nationalism to East Central Europe: Right‐wing intellectual milieus and anti‐liberal resentment

This article emphasises the non‐economic goals of economic nationalism and in particular its often overlooked political goals. Drawing parallels between economic nationalisms in Central Europe and East Asia, it focuses on Poland and Hungary and asks why did these countries turn to economic nationalism. The article traces this turn to ideational foundations developed by right‐wing intellectuals over the last two decades, arguing that right‐wing intellectuals believed that liberalism has failed what they conceived of its most important (political) purpose, the need of a radical break with the communist past. Based on a study of the writings and careers of leading Polish and Hungarian right‐wing intellectuals, the article draws attention to the nature of the perceived threat to the nation. It contributes to the sociology of nationalism an analysis of how such a threat emerges and translates into a guiding idea of illiberal economic policies.     

Urban landscapes and spatial planning in industrial districts: The case of Veneto

A new spatial pattern developed out of a long process of economic, social and physical restructuring which changed Veneto, a poor, mainly agricultural, region into a technologically advanced industrial one, without the major imbalances characterizing other areas. We can assume this new pattern of development as a consequence of a specific growth model. Its typical features are mixture, contemporaneousness, mobility: in such a situation, traditional planning approaches lose most of their validity. Nor is it worth, at this stage, mentioning the economic and environmental reasons that go against such a pattern of scattered growth, since this type of development is the result of an advanced civil and economic condition. This kind of urban development raises a number of new problems: environmental pollution, waste of land, irrational use of the existing infrastructural network. They all require large‐scale planning, which is just what never worked before: the success of the model was largely the result of a set of unplanned policies.     

From Demographic Transition to Fertility Boom and Bust: Iran in the 1980s and 1990s

Although it is widely recognized that demographic transition is not an uninterrupted process, demographers and population economists have treated short‐term swings in fertility with a measure of curiosity. Iran's experience of population growth after the Revolution in 1979 points to a double paradox of a steep and unprecedented surge in population growth in the 1980s followed by a swift restoration of fertility decline in the 1990s. Both periods have been characterized by extensive socio‐economic and institutional changes combined with radical and far‐reaching sways in Iran's post‐revolutionary population policy. This article applies standardized decomposition analysis to separate out and quantify the proximate components of change in the crude birth rate during these two fertility ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ phases. The aim is to ascertain to what extent structural/demographic or behavioural factors can explain the dynamics of change in fertility and population growth in Iran since the late 1970s. Our findings point to a hitherto neglected role of population momentum in initiating the ‘Islamic baby boom’ as well as a more limited role for population policy in explaining the genesis(rather than the momentum) of both boom and bust phases.     

U.S. and Japanese Foreign Direct Investment in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis

East Asia has led the world in economic growth and export expansion in recent decades. The phenomenal rate of economic growth among the so‐called “four little tigers”—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—enabled them to achieve newly industrializing country (NIC) status in the 1980s, followed by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Earlier studies explained the development from the government‐led development paradigm, or the so‐called the statist approach. Scholars also argue that foreign direct investment (FDI) played an important role in the economic development, thanks to technology transfers. Kojima and Ozawa and later Kohama, however, argue that Japanese FDI help East Asian economies while U.S. FDI do not because Japanese technology transfer practices are appropriate for East Asian countries but not the United States'. Thus, we revisit the issue of East Asian economic development and test the economic effects of FDI from the United States and Japan. Using a Barro‐type growth model, we test the effects of FDI from the United States and Japan on economic growth in East Asian NICs. We find that FDI from both the United States and Japan helped economic growth in the “four little tigers,” but not in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.     

Malta: Reclaiming the Naval Heritage?

This paper responds to three current concerns: military geographies, naval heritage in waterfront revitalisation and heritage tourism with particular reference to small‐island states. Malta is of cardinal interest in all these respects. Formerly the premier overseas naval base of the British Empire, it possesses abundant military heritage resources which derive from a culturally composite historical depth as well as from a territory‐wide geographical breadth. Paradoxically, the reclamation of its pre‐eminent naval heritage has been slow by the standards of peers elsewhere, notably Bermuda. The paper examines the reasons for this, what naval heritage reclamation has been undertaken, what is proposed, why this matters to Malta’s tourism economy and what wider significance this naval heritage has for the cultural/economic landscape. Malta is particularly significant in that it both substantially epitomises evolving postcolonial trajectories and uniquely reflects a pan‐European historical identity, befitting its recent accession to the EU.     

Changes in Chilean identity: thirty years after the military coup

ABSTRACT. The objective of this article is to explore whether events, starting with the 1973 military coup and ocurring during the seventeen‐year‐long dictatorship, have caused or influenced important changes in the Chilean national identity. After a brief theoretical discussion, an analysis is made of the upheavals that occurred in Chile during the last thirty years seeking to assess what tensions they have introduced within Chilean identity. As a consequence some changes are detected which can be seen at the level of public discourses on Chilean identity with the emergence or rekindling of military‐racial, Catholic and entrepreneurial narratives. But the most important change that Chilean identity has suffered has to do with the development of an internal fracture stemming from the division introduced by the military regime. In so far as the contents of identity are concerned, the article focuses on the decline in acknowledgement of shared symbols of the nation, the persistence of a pervasive collective anxiety, a recurrence of belief in Chilean exceptionalism, and fading respect for politicians and democracy. These aspects are oddly coupled with rising belief in voluntarism and the possibility of sustained economic growth, increased resort to the market rather than political life as the site of recognition, acceptance of malaise as the price of economic progress and a remarkable centrality of human rights issues.     

Behind the Seven Veils of Inequality. What if it's all about the Struggle within just One Half of the Population over just One Half of the National Income?

This article addresses three main issues: why there is such a huge diversity of disposable income inequality across the world, why there is such a deterioration of market inequality among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and why inequality seems to move in ‘waves’. There are many underlying questions: does diversity reflect a variety of fundamentals, or a multiplicity of power structures and choice? Is rising market inequality the product of somehow ‘exogenous’ factors (e.g., r>g), or of complex interactions between political settlements and market failures? How do we get through the veils obscuring these interactions and distorting our vision of the often self‐constructed nature of inequality? Has neoliberal globalization broadened the scope for ‘distributional failures’ by, for example, triggering a process of ‘reverse catching‐up’ in the OECD, so that highly unequal middle‐income countries like those in Latin America now embody the shape of things to come? Are we all converging towards features such as mobile élites creaming off the rewards of economic growth, and ‘magic realist’ politics that lack self‐respect if not originality? Should I say, ‘Welcome to the Third World’? In this paper I also develop a new approach for examining and measuring inequality (distance from distributive targets), and a new concept of ‘distributional waves’. The article concludes that, to understand current distributive dynamics, what matters is to comprehend the forces determining the share of the rich — and, in terms of growth, what they choose to do with it (and how they are allowed do it).     

The early Byzantine economy in context: aristocratic property and economic growth reconsidered

This article responds to recent primitivist claims with respect to the late antique economy of the early Byzantine period. It examines the archaeological and documentary evidence for economic sophistication in early Byzantine Egypt, and addresses the issue of economic growth in late antiquity as a whole by placing the evidence for early Byzantine economic expansion in a broader medieval context. In particular, the epiphenomena of economic growth in late antiquity are compared to the epiphenomena of statistically demonstrable economic growth in Anglo‐Norman England.     

Political economy,demography and development in Australia's Northern Territory

The Canadian ‘staples thesis’ literature has documented both the risks (in the tradition of Harold Innis) and the opportunities (in the tradition of W. A. Macintosh) inherent in economies that are dependent on the export of minimally processed natural resources. The key risk is that of retarded long‐term growth as a result of a lack of diversification and over‐dependence on foreign capital and markets. This article argues that the demographic consequences of staples approaches to development also make it difficult to achieve diversification. It profiles Australia's Northern Territory as an example of a mining‐dependent (fiscal) economy that demonstrates a particular demographic profile consistent with what might be expected of a resource frontier. The article argues, however, that restrictive demographic characteristics persist (high sex ratios, high population mobility, disadvantaged position of indigenous people and remote dwellers) even though mining has become an insignificant direct employer (less than one percent of the workforce) and the services sector drives the labour market. This persistence can be linked to the Territory and federal government expectations of economic development patterns in the region and the frontier mythology created around the Northern Territory. Addressing the demographic imbalance is a critical step towards realizing ambitions for economic diversification.     

Governance,Policy Innovation,and Local Economic Development in North Carolina

This article examines the extent to which local governments in North Carolina embrace innovation in their economic development activities. The study makes a distinctive theoretical contribution by examining the relationship between innovation in how economic development policies are administered and implemented (using concepts associated with governance and NPM), and innovation in what is substantively done (policy innovation). An analysis of the results from a statewide survey of local governments in North Carolina finds that certain governance/management variables are significant determinants of economic development policy innovation. An implication of this finding is that new ways of doing economic development may go hand‐in‐hand with new ways of governing and managing. Many of the governance/management variables are also positively associated with the use of a greater number of traditional economic development strategies and tools. This suggests that local governments may find it helpful to be innovative in how they implement economic development irrespective of the substantive policy orientation of particular strategies and tools.     

MAKING SENSE OF THE GREEN ECONOMY

This special issue editorial explores potential research interfaces between human geography and the rapidly unfolding concept and practices of the “green economy”. The article outlines a range of critical issues about the green economy that are particularly pertinent and suited to geographical analysis. The first concerns questions around the construction of the green economy concept and critical questioning of current, largely hegemonic neoliberal, growth‐focused and technocentric definitions of the green economy. The second broaches the spatial complexities of green economic transitions, while the third discusses the need for critical appraisal of the logics and mechanisms of governance and transition that see the green economy as a key mechanism for economic, social and environmental change. The fourth focuses on the crucial issue of micro‐level and individual practices and behaviour, and on links between individual behaviour and wider economic‐environmental governance and economic systems. Finally, the article discusses the need for scholars to engage in imaginative consideration of alternatives to current, growth‐focused paradigms and conceptualizations of the green economy.     

Growth and Convergence in a Multiregional Model with Space–Time Dynamics. 多区域时空动态模型的增长与收敛

The goal of this article is to test four distinct hypotheses about whether the relative location of an economy affects economic growth and economic well‐being using an extended Solow–Swan neoclassical growth model that incorporates both space and time dynamics. We show that the econometric specification takes the form of an unconstrained spatial Durbin model, and we investigate whether the results depend on some methodological issues, such as the choice of the time span and the inclusion of fixed effects. To estimate the fixed effects spatial Solow–Swan model, we adjust the Arrelano and Bond (1991) generalized method‐of‐moments (GMM) estimator to deal with endogeneity not only arising from the initial income level, as in the basic model, but also from the initial income levels and economic growth rates observed in neighboring economies.     

Welfare accounting and the environment: reassessing Brazilian economic growth, 1965-1993

Few countries in recent decades have experienced economic growth as rapid as that in Brazil. The period spanning the late 1960s and mid 1970s, during which GDP growth was especially strong, is often referred to as the ‘economic miracle’. Yet, the use of per capita GDP growth as a proxy for economic development (or social welfare improvement) can be questioned on both distributional and environmental grounds. Scholars such as Ahluwalia and Chenery have noted that per capita GDP growth places greater weight on the income of richer income groups, and have proposed distribution‐neutral and pro‐poor alternatives. More recently, studies by the World Resources Institute and others have questioned the environmental sustainability of GDP growth and have introduced an alternative national income accounting methodology that factors in estimated losses associated with natural resource depletion. To date, no studies have undertaken both types of revisions concurrently, creating a revised national welfare measure based on per capita GDP, but corrected for both distributional bias and resource depletion. Such a measure is derived in this article and applied to the Brazilian case. The results cast doubt on the proposition that rapid economic growth in Brazil has resulted in comparable welfare gains.