DOES AGGLOMERATION MATTER EVERYWHERE?: NEW FIRM LOCATION DECISIONS IN RURAL AND URBAN MARKETS*

We test whether commonly used measures of agglomeration economies encourage new firm entry in both urban and rural markets. Using new firm location decisions in Iowa and North Carolina, we find that measured agglomeration economies increase the probability of new firm entry in both urban and rural areas. Firms are more likely to locate in markets with an existing cluster of firms in the same industry, with greater concentrations of upstream suppliers or downstream customers, and with a larger proportion of college‐educated workers in the local labor supply. Firms are less likely to enter markets with no incumbent firms in the sector or where production is concentrated in relatively few sectors. The same factors encourage both stand‐alone start‐ups and establishments built by multiplant firms. Commuting decisions exhibit the same pattern as new firm entry with workers commuting from low to high agglomeration markets. Because agglomeration economies are important for rural firm entry also, policies encouraging new firm entry should focus on relatively few job centers rather than encouraging new firm entry in every small town.     

沈阳铁西工业区改造的制度与文化因素

沈阳铁西区是在计划经济体制下形成的国内外著名的城市老工业区,1986年国务院批准为国家计划中唯一的区域性改造试点工程。但长期的技术改造为主策略并未使沈阳铁西工业区摆脱困境。2002年沈阳铁西区和沈阳经济技术开发区合署办公,为铁西工业区改造提供了新的制度动力。本文简要回顾了沈阳铁西区发展改造历程,重点分析了沈阳铁西工业区改造取得突破的制度和文化原因,讨论了"铁西模式"的内在逻辑和潜在问题及其对其它城市老工业区改造的启示。     

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.     

全球化背景下的广东省制造业地理集中研究

本文利用2004年经济普查的数据,分析了广东省制造业的地理分布特征。广东省大多数的制造业地理集中程度都较高,并且主要集中在珠三角地区,很多地理集中程度较高的制造业分布都存在较高的空间自相关性。对广东省制造业集中的实证研究表明,资源和能源投入强度较高的产业较为集聚,并且出口显著提高了产业集聚程度。尽管外资是广东省制造业发展的重要力量,但是并没有促进产业的集聚,说明制造业外资已经进入扩散阶段。本文的结果和全国尺度的研究结果存在差异,这说明地理尺度对于研究产业集聚非常重要。     

瓦房店市轴承企业集聚及持续发展研究

我国东北老工业基地一些工业部门由于自身生产设备老化、技术增长缓慢及市场需求结构变化等原因出现了不同程度的衰退现象,而瓦房店市轴承产业在受到国内外市场冲击以及我国经济体制转型的双重影响下仍能立于不败之地,发展成为我国轴承生产基地,与大企业的基础带动作用和中小企业的集聚是分不开的,企业集聚对县域经济可持续发展具有明显的推动作用。在企业访谈基础上,对瓦房店市轴承企业集聚发展动因、过程与类型加以分析,进而提出轴承企业集聚持续发展对策。     

Beyond the Property Rights Approach: Welfare Policy and the Reform of State‐Owned Enterprises in China

During the pre‐reform era, Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) operated not only as firms, but also as mini‐welfare states, providing employees with lifetime employment, inexpensive housing, free health care, and pensions. Since China’s market transition began in the late 1970s, however, SOEs have had to bear increasingly heavy burdens for welfare provisions to their employees. The steep increase in welfare spending has not only eroded the base of state revenue, but has also impeded further SOE reforms. To lighten welfare burdens upon SOEs and to remove institutional obstacles to marketization and privatization embedded in the existing welfare system, the Chinese state has imposed many welfare reforms aimed at shifting responsibilities for welfare provision from SOEs to a combination of government, enterprises, communities, and individuals. This article examines the belated welfare reforms in China’s state sector and their impact upon the reform of SOEs. It finds that reform implementation has been sluggish. To achieve the policy goal of welfare reforms, high degrees of state autonomy and capacity are needed.     

Determinants of postdisplacement reemployment outcomes and occupation changes

We investigate the roles played by agglomeration (proxied by population density) and occupational distribution on postdisplacement employment outcomes for US workers, focusing on the probability of being employed, the likelihood of changing occupations, and the occupational distance between the old and new occupations (where occupational distance is defined as the difference in job tasks between two occupations). Overall, we find that the local occupational distribution has a greater impact on our outcome variables compared with our agglomeration measure. Our findings suggest policy makers should look closely at occupational distribution when designing job training programs and proposals for relocation vouchers.     

The impact of crime on firm entry

The article investigates the effect of crime on firm entry rates in Italian provinces over the period 2007–2016. The extant literature focuses mainly on the relationship between crime and the sorting of new businesses. The present paper contributes to this stream of work by estimating the effect of crime on the overall propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities across a national territory. We measure the extent to which property and violent crime affect firm entry rates using an instrumental variable approach in which the instrument for criminal activity is the effective abortion rate. Our findings suggest that crime has a negative, sizable impact on firm entry. The results are robust to alternative instrumental variables and firm entry indicators. This empirical exercise emphasizes the need to consider loss of new business activities as a downstream effect when computing the social costs of crime.     

河南省工业企业创新绩效及影响因素分析

创新是经济发展的驱动力,影响区域创新绩效的因素很多,本文从宏观经济、行业、企业、外部力量等四个尺度构建了企业创新模型,利用1991 年到2014 年统计数据,探讨了人均GDP 水平、产业集聚、企业规模、R&D 、FDI、技术引进这六个因素对河南省专利授权量的影响。研究发现：在企业尺度上,企业规模、R&D经费显著正向影响河南工业企业的创新绩效;在中观尺度上,产业集聚还没有发挥很好的集聚效益;反映经济发展水平的人均GDP在统计上并未显著影响创新绩效,甚至是负影响;外部力量尺度上,外商直接投资增强了创新的绩效,而技术引进与创新绩效则呈显著负相关。综合来看,企业创新是一个多尺度因素相互作用的非线性过程,各种力量对创新的影响机理也较为复杂。     

The “who” and “how” of place marketing: the role of the private sector in Rutherford County,North Carolina

ABSTRACT

Private sector actors are often viewed as a part of the outcome for an economic development project. The assumption, however, ignores the early role of the private sector in marketing places for firm recruitment. Through a study of two recruitment projects in Rutherford County, North Carolina, I examine the points of entry of private sector actors in the place marketing process. Data gathered from interviews and primary sources reveal that the private sector is actively leading the recruitment of firms and the marketing of places. This paper shows how private sector actors produce knowledge about places, market a place within their own interests, and shape a government’s agenda through their involvement in place marketing. Examining economic development actors as active place-makers reveals how, through place marketing processes, these actors incorporate their own interests in the construction of place.     

产业集聚:地理学与经济学主流观点的对比

20世纪80年代以来,国际学术界出现了两种以企业行为的分析为基础解释产业空间集聚的"新经济地理学"理论模型:地理学中的"新经济与工业地理学"和经济学中的"地理经济学"。本文从理论起源、产业集聚的成因、市场结构的性质、外部经济的类型、交易关系与根植性、产业集聚的机制等方面对二者进行了系统的比较分析。     

The spatial scope of agglomeration economies in Brazil

This paper provides evidence about location and colocation patterns of manufacturing entrepreneurship and spatial scope of agglomeration economies in the context of a developing country. Using microgeographic data for all Brazilian manufacturing activities and distance-based measures, we find clear patterns of colocalization between entrants and existing establishments, and that these patterns occur mainly at short distances. For activities presenting colocalization between entrants and existing establishments, our results also indicate that a greater number of incumbent establishments in a given location positively affects the number of entrant establishments that decide to locate there, an effect that attenuates rapidly with distance (generally disappearing after 5 km). This pattern of attenuation is robust to both the inclusion of a comprehensive set of controls for observable and unobservable local characteristics and the use of instrumental variables to address remaining endogeneity concerns.     

All Strings Attached: Negotiating Relationships of Geographic Information Science

Human geography has driven substantive improvements in methodologies and applications of Geographic Information Systems (GISs), yet Indigenous groups continue to experience erasure in geographic representations. GIS ontologies comprise categorised labels that represent lived contexts, and these ontologies are determined through the shared worldviews of those labelling spatial phenomena for entry into GIS databases. Although Western ontologies and spatial representations reflect Western understandings of human experience, they are often inappropriate in Indigenous contexts. In efforts to be represented in courts and land management, Indigenous groups nevertheless need to engage Western spatial representations to ‘claim space’. This paper examines what GISs are and do and shows that GIS technology comes with strings attached to the myriad social contexts that continue to shape the field of GIScience. We show that Intellectual Property Rights Agreements can sever and control these ‘strings’; the agreement between the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation and university researchers reframes GIS from a technology of erasure to a technology of opportunity that enables Indigenous groups to define their own engagement. The visual and narrative outputs will contribute important understandings of the environmental crisis facing the Murray–Darling Basin and connect older and younger generations through knowledge sharing. We conclude the application of GIScience is never simply technological but always has potential to empower particular communities. Applying GIS technology to new circumstances is an engagement of new relationships in the social praxis of technology transfer, where worldviews meet and negotiations are made over what exists and how we know.     

Geographical Concentration of Manufacturing Industries in China: The Importance of Spatial and Industrial Scales

Using the most recent data from the first economic census in China, a team of China-based and American economic geographers investigates the geographical concentration of manufacturing industries at the provincial and county levels by integrating proxy variables for natural advantages, agglomeration economies, and institutional changes (e.g., decentralization) associated with economic transition. The authors focus their investigation on manufacturing activity as a whole, as well as on manufacturing categories at the two- and three-digit levels of aggregation (the latter representing a finer scale of analysis than used in almost all previous studies). Interesting differences emerge in the locational patterns of industries whose enterprises pursue strategies of globalization vis-à-vis local protectionism. Differences also are apparent in the impacts of agglomeration economies and knowledge spillover at different spatial scales. The findings suggest that both spatial scale and level of industrial aggregation matter when analyzing patterns of industrial agglomeration in China. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: L10, L20, L60, O18. 5 figures, 5 tables, 50 references.     

COLLEGE-TO-WORK MIGRATION OF TECHNOLOGY GRADUATES AND HOLDERS OF DOCTORATES WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT.  This study estimates a series of random parameter logit models of the college-to-work migration decisions of technology graduates and holders of doctorates within the United States. We employ detailed information on the migration-relevant characteristics of individuals, as well as on their actual origins and destinations at the metropolitan scale. In addition to its obvious implications for "brain drain" policies in U.S. metropolitan areas, the study demonstrates the richness of the random parameters technique for behavioral-geographic analysis. We find that science and technology graduates migrate to better educated places, other things equal; that PhD graduates pay greater attention to amenity characteristics than other degree holders; and that foreign students from some immigrant groups migrate to places where those groups are concentrated.     

重点开发区域工业空间格局、集疏差异及影响机制——以福建沿海地区为例

以福建沿海地区为例,利用微观工业企业数据库,探究了重点开发区域工业空间演化、产业集疏差异及其形成机制。研究表明:福建沿海地区工业发展水平大幅提升且空间差距逐渐缩小,空间形态向成熟的产业带演进,产业空间分工表现出同质化特征;不同类型行业的空间集疏过程呈现出显著差异,其中资本密集型产业表现为持续扩散趋势;地形和生态可占性、资源环境承载力对产业空间形态具有基础性作用,地区经济技术是产业空间格局演化的重要驱动力,临港区位和交通条件改善不断促进产业发生空间集聚与扩散,区域发展战略以及产业政策为工业空间调整提供了具体方向。研究结论可为重点开发区域工业空间布局优化提供一定的借鉴。     

Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

University–Industry Knowledge Transfer and Network Patterns in Romania: Does Knowledge Supply Fit SMEs' Regional Profiles?

Universities' potential to contribute to regional value creation has been extensively discussed so far and significant literature has been devoted to celebrated cases in highly industrialized and developed countries. Assuming that it would be misleading to generalize from “exceptional” cases, some authors have focused their attention specifically on the influence of universities in less developed areas regions and countries, where university–industry relations are far from being a Triple Helix. This paper focuses on the mechanisms of university–industry knowledge transfer (KT) in Romania, a post-communist country with relatively weak regional innovation performances, except for the capital region Bucharest-Ilfov. The purpose of the study is to construct an index to compare university–industry KT across the eight Romanian regions. Data to be aggregated are collected from 90 Romanian higher education institutions and refer to their KT potential in terms of human, financial and relational inputs, outputs and outcomes (patent applications, new products and services, spin-offs and commercial income). Finally, universities' regional KT performances are compared to small and medium enterprises territorial patterns and issuing policy implications are discussed.     

河南高新技术产业集聚分析

本文的研究表明,河南高新技术产业表现出十分明显的集聚特征,并依据其技术的先进性分化出3个空间层次。同时,在集聚主导下,河南高新技术产业布局还存在着分散化趋势。这种格局主要受区位效应、先行效应、企业扩张与衍生的本地化、地方政府的学习机制和发展产业的路径依赖等4个机制的共同作用。河南高新技术产业的集聚产生了明显的集聚效益,集聚效益与各高新区的集聚程度成正比。在此基础上,本文提出了优化高新技术产业布局,加快河南高新技术产业发展的建议。     

Measuring relatedness in a multisectoral cluster: an input–output approach

Studies in evolutionary economic geography have found that knowledge spillovers, crucial for the development and maintenance of clusters, tend to flow between sectors that are related via similar inputs and/or outputs. Thus, there is a growing body of literature stating that industrial variety within clusters is beneficial for economic growth, whereby local industrial diversity sparks creativity, new ideas and innovations. Within this context, the Irish Maritime and Energy Resource Cluster (IMERC) is a diverse, multisectoral cluster. Using an Input–Output table this paper examines the intra-cluster linkages, as well as the relatedness in terms of inputs and outputs across the four IMERC pillars: Marine Energy; Shipping, Logistics and Transport; Maritime Safety and Security; and Yachting Products and Services. This analysis found that although IMERC has weak intra-cluster linkages, the four pillars share a high number of related inputs and outputs. Based on this analysis, IMERC has the potential to develop into a strong maritime cluster.