SOCIALIST FEDERALISM AND SPATIAL EQUITY: REVIEW OF A DISCUSSION

The proceedings of a wide-ranging discussion at the Institute of Geography, Moscow on current political and territorial issues in the USSR are summarized by one of its participants. The key thrust of the discussion centered on the need to find ways of increasing the involvement of Soviet political and other geographers in the analysis of critical questions of Soviet federalism: the incongruence of political-administrative boundaries with ethnic and economic regions; the search for a viable division of authority among Moscow, the republics, and local soviets; mitigation of growing regional inequality engendered by perestroyka and regional khozraschet (translated by Jay K. Mitchell, PlanEcon, Inc., Washington, DC 20005).     

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN THE USSR, 1970-1988: PART I (PRODUCTION AND PRODUCTIVITY)

The first of two articles devoted to spatial and temporal trends in economic development and levels of living within the USSR focuses on changes in the pattern of absolute and per capita economic output—national income produced and gross value of industrial output (at the republic and economic regional level, respectively). It then investigates the question of whether divergence or convergence has occurred among republics and economic regions in terms of these indicators. Finally, it assesses patterns of change in labor and capital productivity across Soviet republics.     

On the Comparative Effectiveness of the Economic Structure of Regions

An important problem in insuring optimal operation of the centrally planned and state-controlled economy of the Soviet Union is to measure the efficacy of the industrial structure and productive specialization of republics and economic regions. Several measures of the efficacy of regional economies have been proposed, involving various relationships between labor productivity, the value of capital plant and equipment and the value of output. All these measures are unsatisfactory, in the author's view, and an alternate approach is suggested, using the net concept of national income produced by regions. This approach has been made possible by the recent calculation of input-output tables for republics and economic regions. The idea of using national income as a measure of regional economic efficacy was first proposed in the Soviet literature by A. Ye. Probst, whose comments appear elsewhere in the issue of Soviet Geography.     

PANEL ON NATIONALISM IN THE USSR: ENVIRONMENTAL AND TERRITORIAL ASPECTS

A panel of geographers, demographers, and political scientists discusses a broad range of issues related to the resurgence of nationalism in the USSR and its relationship to environmental protest and territorial disputes: the emergence of nationality politics; differential rates of nationality population growth and urbanization; various conceptions of (and levels of autonomy within) ethnic homelands; the spatial pattern of actual and potential territorial claims; linkages between environmentalism and nationalism (with an emphasis on the Baltic and Central Asian republics); parallels and differences between the USSR and other countries; and consequences of efforts to implement republic-level economic autonomy and khozraschet.     

COMPARATIVE GEOGRAPHY OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE USSR: AN INITIAL INVESTIGATION

Several aspects of the distribution of institutions of higher education and their graduates are compared for the Soviet Union and the United States. The concentration of institutions and students is found to be greater in the USSR. Differences in regional enrollment rates relative to the location of institutions and students may be partly explained by differences in the curriculum structure of American and Soviet institutions of higher education and the greater degree of local control over higher education in the United States. A direct relationship exists in both countries between the percentage of graduates in a region and percentage urban and per capita income. Regional inequality in the percentage of graduates in urban versus rural areas is much greater in the USSR while regional inequality in the percentage of male and female graduates was only somewhat greater in the United States. Level of urbanization, migration of students and graduates, economic opportunity and economic structure are seen as important factors helping explain regional variation in the distribution of graduates.     

江苏省区域经济差异与发展战略演变初探

改革开放以来,江苏省分别实施了区域均衡发展、非均衡发展、区域共同发展和苏北大发展战略,造成了各区域间经济增长速度的差异,导致区域经济发展失衡,其主要表现为苏南、苏中与苏北三大经济区域间的差异和县域经济差异的不断扩大。在分析了现阶段江苏省沿江开发战略对区域发展差异的影响,立足区域整合的角度,提出加快沿江开发与苏北互动发展的对策与措施,以期实现江苏省区域经济的协调发展,扭转南北经济差异进一步扩大的趋势。     

The Dynamics of Regional Invention and Innovation: Innovative Capacity and Regional Change in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century dynamics of United States regional invention trends are explored in this study. Historically, regions that become major loci of invention have always gained much influence, through innovation diffusion, their human capital infrastructures, and their national economic and political projection. The United States has experienced a remarkable inversion of regional roles on invention since the middle of the twentieth century, where the predominant position of heartland regions (the Northeast and the Midwest) is being overturned. This analysis develops a macro-level measure of inventive output, innovative capacity, to evaluate changes in regional inventive performance and the potential for innovation. The analysis of patent age cycles provides insights on the temporal structure of the national and regional innovative capacity, and on the dynamics of crisis periods for U.S. scientific and technological invention. A consideration of regional income trends over the twentieth century and of innovative capacity performance shows the potential importance of endogenously generated inventions for regional development.     

A Quantitative Approach to Designing a System of Economic Regions of the USSR

The authors state the rationale and describe the technique used to devise a system of seven economic macroregions of the USSR for long-term planning purposes. Since broad resource groups determine the specialization of regional complexes and their specialization in the geographical division of labor, the macroregions were constructed on the basis of homogeneity in key resources, such as manpower, fuels, land, water and transport geography. The new regional system preserves the basic division of the USSR into western and eastern economic zones, and reflects the lower labor and transport costs in the west, and the lower natural-resource costs in the east. The seven-region system, which is already being used in the 15-year plan 1975–1990, is expected to help determine optimal directions of regional development depending on whether regions have surpluses or are short of fuels, electric power, land, water or manpower. The new macroregions were designed by consolidating existing basic economic regions and union republics into larger entities, but the republics may be set apart as subzones for more detailed planning purposes.     

FROM KARLO-LIBKNEKHTOVSK AND NEW YORK TO PROPOYSK AND RASTYAPINO?: HOW PLACE NAMES ARE CHANGING IN THE FORMER USSR

In a paper submitted directly to Post-Soviet Geography, the author presents as thorough a list of place name changes as possible for the former USSR for the period 1985 to mid-1992. The situation is assessed with respect to the former union republics, nationality-based lower-order administrative territorial units, oblasts and krays, and major cities and urban settlements. The list appears to represent the most thorough and authoritative compilation of its kind yet published in the West, given the absence of any official body now empowered with the approval and registration of place name changes across the entire geographic space of the former USSR.     

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SECTORAL AND SPATIAL MANAGEMENT IN THE ELECTRIC POWER INDUSTRY OF THE USSR

The management system of the electric power industry of the USSR operates at two technological levels: a lower level of 92 regional power systems, each encompassing one or more oblast-type civil divisions or a small union republic; an upper level in which regional systems are combined into 11 unified power systems, where peak loads can be more easily moved between time zones. In addition there are electric power administrations within the RSFSR and ministries within the union republics, concerned mainly with administrative functions. Power administrations often do not coincide with unified systems, creating problems of efficient electric power management. Furthermore, the boundaries of unified power systems and power administrations often do not conform to the boundaries of major economic regions, which are used for current and long-term planning of the Soviet economy. This does not necessarily mean that the power systems are out of step with the economic regions. Soviet economic regionalization theory has long stressed the important region-shaping role of electric power systems. It may well be that in some cases, the boundaries of economic regions, not the power systems, require adjustment.     

The Second Interagency Conference on Population Geography

A theory that areal variations in economic development in the USSR (analyzed at the oblast level for most republics) depend on regional economic structure, economic policy, cultural factors, and the center-periphery dichotomy is tested via simple regression analysis, using retail sales per capita as the indicator of economic level. The independent variables are: share of urban population (for economic structure), investments (for economic policy), percentage of Moslem population (for the cultural factor), and distance from Moscow (for the periphery effect). All of these variables except distance were significant in explaining the real variation in retail sales per capita.     

Scientific Principles of the General Outline for the Location of Productive Forces of the USSR for the Period up to 1970

The Council for the Study of Productive Forces, the preplanning economic research agency of the USSR, has completed a general outline for economic development of the Soviet Union over the period 1971–1980. The general outline contains sections devoted to particular sectors of the economy, to particular republics and economic regions, and to major areal development complexes. It is the result of a five-year effort that involved 20,000 scholars and technicians associated with 560 research and planning agencies. The present paper deals with the fundamental principles that guided the drafting of this 10-year development program, which has not been published. The paper focuses on five aspects that have been of particular relevance in resolving location problems: (1) the accelerating rate of scientific and technical progress, (2) the assuring of the proper territorial proportions in economic development, (3) the formation of new regions and economic complexes, (4) new problems in the man-nature relationship, notably environmental pollution, and (5) the close relationship between systems of settlement and the location of development projects.     

Analyzing Regional Inequality in Post-Mao China in a GIS Environment

Regional inequality in China has attracted considerable scholarly attention, but the use of geographic information system (GIS) techniques for rigorous analysis remains limited. This paper utilizes recent data and GIS and spatial statistical techniques to analyze changing patterns of regional inequality in China from 1978 to 2000. It also identifies the changing clusters of regional development in China. We illustrate that regional inequality in China is sensitive to development trajectories of the provinces, and that conventional measures of regional inequality mask geographical clustering. Patterns of change are explained by both contextual and regression analyses. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F21, G32, P31. 16 figures, 3 tables, 30 references.     

The Changing Geography of Violence in Russia's North Caucasus, 1999-2011: Regional Trends and Local Dynamics in Dagestan,Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria

Three U.S. geographers analyze the temporal and spatial trends of 17,438 violent events in Russia's North Caucasus region from August 1999 to July 2011, demonstrating that the diffusion of conflict away from Chechnya intensified during the period 2007-2011, as levels of violence rose in neighboring republics. An increasing number of casualties are civilians in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, the three republics that are the focus of the paper. Employing multiple methods of spatial pattern analysis and geographically sensitive regression models, the authors examine the spatial fragmentation of violence from the perspective of rebel groups operating in the three republics. The analysis documents how the incidence of violence varies dramatically over space (i.e., reflecting the influence of urbanization, strategic location, and physical geographic factors such as elevation and extent of forest cover). Although violence in the North Caucasus region as a whole has declined in absolute terms over the past four years, the authors show how new geographies of violence are developing in the region, underscoring the emergence of republic-based insurgent operations against the various organs of the Russian state. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H560, H770, O180. 9 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 103 references:     

Party Ideologies and Regional Inequality: An Analysis of Party Manifestos in Japan

ABSTRACT

Regional inequality within Japan has been a key political issue in Japanese politics throughout the entire postwar period. In this analysis, we examine how Japanese parties have positioned themselves on the question of regional inequality, focusing on how the party system response has been shaped by ideas and ideologies. The article analyses two 15-year periods separated by a quarter of a century (1960–75 and 2000–15) during which regional inequalities became a particularly salient and pressing issue. We compare institutional and socioeconomic contexts, broader governing ideas, and policy responses to this issue by major parties in their election platforms (manifestos). We find that party ideology and broader paradigms continued to shape party responses to regional inequality during both periods.     

REGIONAL INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURES AND ECONOMIC PROSPECTS IN THE FORMER USSR

The value of output, employment, and capital stock for each industrial sector for each oblast-level spatial unit in the former USSR, as well as differences in regional industrial structures are presented on the basis of a unique set of unpublished Goskomstat data. Particular emphasis is placed on asessing the regions' relative raw materials endowments, especially with respect to energy resources, and on the degree of diversification, or lack of same, within their industrial structures. The extremely uneven distribution of industrial capacity is examined in light of its role in determining the near- and longer-term economic prospects for the various republics and regions.     

Integrated Regional Geographic Atlases

The author reviews work on atlases of Soviet republics and oblasts published in 1961–64, containing maps on physical geography, population, economy and culture. He finds that these atlases suffer from a lack of practical purposefulness and inadequate coordination. These weaknesses are to be remedied in a new coordinated project of natural-resource atlases of the major republics and economic regions of the USSR initiated in 1963.     

Neoliberalism and the Institutions for Regional Development in Australia

This paper examines some effects of the pursuit of neoliberalism on regional development policy and practice in Australia, and in particular on the activities and effectiveness of regional development organisations. The paper interprets data from a survey of 505 regional development organisations across Australia through the framework of Jessop's contribution to state theory and his identification of four key trends in economic management under neoliberalism. Regional development policies are seen as a response of governments to electoral pressure from regions, but a response that is constrained by the dominance of neoliberal ideology. The objectives of regional development are predominantly economic, but are often limited to the role of facilitation and the provision of information. Some responsibility for regional development has been shifted downwards to regions, but the effectiveness of the organisations given this responsibility is reduced by the short‐term and competitive nature of much of their funding, the lack of coordination between regional development actors at the local level, the proliferation of agencies and the competition between them. The paper concludes that regional development agencies in Australia are in many ways a product of neoliberalism, since they represent one way in which governments can be seen to be responding to regional pressure for assistance but they can do so without incurring significant costs. Yet regional development bodies are also a victim of neoliberalist thinking, since it denies them the resources and the powers they need to be more successful in their work.     

THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON REGIONAL WAGE INEQUALITY: A SEMIPARAMETRIC APPROACH

According to economic theory, regional migration is a primary mechanism through which regional wage convergence is predicted to occur. However, this does not necessarily imply that regional migration has an equalizing effect on regional inequality. Despite considerable literatures on regional migration and regional wage inequality, little attention has focused on the relationship between the two. This paper investigates one of the primary mechanisms through which migration affects individual region's wage distributions. It adopts a semiparametric procedure to examine how the regional wage distributions in Great Britain have changed as a result of migration using British Household Panel Survey data for 1991–2007.     

UPWARDS,OUTWARDS AND WESTWARDS: RELOCATION OF ETHNIC MINORITY GROUPS IN THE OSLO REGION

Our purpose in this article is to examine socio‐economic and spatial integration of ethnic minorities in the Oslo region. We analyse relocation between 1998 and 2008 for members of ten minority groups along three overlapping dimensions: upwards in the neighbourhood hierarchy, outwards from the inner city to all suburbs, and westwards from a less affluent to a more affluent part of the region. The results provide some limited support for spatial assimilation theory. Two minority groups, Iranians and Vietnamese, comply partly with the theory. Another group, Filipinos, has stagnated in its socio‐economic and spatial integration. The remaining groups do not relocate in accordance with the native pattern, or fail to integrate in socio‐economic terms. The discrepancy between theory and results is most pronounced along the westward axis. We interpret the results in a broader context of regional and national circumstances: spatial assimilation theory may have different utility in different welfare regimes, depending on spatial inequality and the politics of place.