REGIONAL POPULATION–EMPLOYMENT DYNAMICS ACROSS DIFFERENT SECTORS OF THE ECONOMY*

ABSTRACT An important subset of the literature on agglomeration externalities hypothesizes that intrasectoral and intersectoral relations are endogenously determined in models of local and regional economic growth. Remarkably, structural adjustment models describing the spatio‐temporal dynamics of population and employment levels or growth traditionally do not include intersectoral economic dynamics. This paper argues and shows that allowing for economic linkages across sectors in these models adds considerable value, especially in forecasting. An econometric model of population–employment dynamics, in which sectoral variations in economic development are explicitly taken into account, is applied to a large urban planning policy proposal in the Netherlands. The empirical analyses suggest that population dynamics are largely exogenous, population changes drive employment in particular in the industry and retail sectors, and employment in all sectors depends strongly on intersectoral dynamics. Intersectoral dynamics appear as important drivers of regional sectoral employment changes; they are even more important than population changes, and their effect shows up clearly even within the Dutch institutional context where strict regulatory housing and planning restrictions are enforced.     

Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and its Geographic Discourse

Conventional thinking about war is encumbered by an inappropriate geographic paradigm that conceptualizes "targets" in terms of fixed latitudinal/longitudinal locations. This paper reconceptualizes terms such as "war" and "targets" to recognize intangible problems and develop appropriate counter‐terrorist strategies. This requires geographic inquiry focused on spatiality, not on location. We frame our discussion about terrorist networks (Al‐Qaeda in particular) in terms of understanding a network's sense of place and sense of space . The former "places" a network's meeting and recruiting grounds; the latter clarifies the operational dynamics of a network across space, at different scales, from the body to the neighborhood, to the region, and across nations. We argue that the roots of terrorism lie in conditions of disenfranchisement in particular types of places, understanding, however, that the socio‐cultural fabric of a terrorist network such as Al‐Qaeda evolves across space as well as time. Counter‐terrorist strategies should target neither people nor places but rather the conditions that give rise to terrorism; further, "intelligence" should focus on network dynamics, beyond particular people in particular places. We draw from network theories (specifically actor network theory and network approaches in economic sociology) to unravel network dynamics, and we draw from the literature on spatiality to interpret such dynamics in space, over time. We advocate a non‐military engagement with terrorism on both moral and strategic grounds; here we focus on the strategic dimension, the value of which has received scant attention.     

The Paradox of Contemporary Immigrant Political Mobilization: Organized Labor, Undocumented Migrants, and Electoral Participation in Los Angeles

This article illuminates a paradox in the contemporary political mobilization of new Americans. While labor unions are taking an increasingly active role in the successful mobilization of foreign‐born residents in electoral politics, a substantial number of these newly mobilized Americans are undocumented migrants and residents, and thus are members of a growing and permanently disenfranchised working class. While this marginalized labor force benefits capital, an expanding long‐term, non‐citizen population presents a serious challenge to democratic politics. In this article, I discuss a case study which demonstrates both sides of this paradox. Facilitated by broader Latino political mobilization, their membership in progressive labor unions, and labor's shifting political strategy, many undocumented residents of Los Angeles are participating in candidate endorsements, campaign rallies, and "get out the vote" efforts, even though they are unable to vote on election day. Their actions portend future reconfigurations of the boundaries which surround citizenship and suffrage.     

Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers

In the 1970s, Italy experienced a difficult transition from Fordism to a flexible accumulation regime. The resulting changes in production relations led to the disappearance of traditional public spaces and meeting places such as open squares, workplaces, party offices or the premises of groups involved in the antagonistic, ie anti‐capitalist and anti‐fascist, movement. Within this context, in the 1980s and 1990s, these groups managed to create new social and political spaces by setting up Self‐Managed Social Centers (CSAs), ie squatted properties which became the venue of social, political and cultural events. Over 250 Social Centers have been active in Italy over the past 15 years, especially in urban areas. Their organizational modes are examples of successful direct democracy in non‐hierarchical structures and may provide alternative options to the bureaucratic organization of so many aspects of social and political life. Point number one on a Social Center's agenda is a daunting task: it must renovate and refurbish privately or publicly owned empty properties and turn them into public spaces open to the general public. For this task it relies exclusively on collective action, ie cooperative working modes which do not come under the provisions governing regular employment contracts and can thus be used to combat marginalization and exclusion processes which are becoming more and more dramatic in our cities. An analysis of the evolution of this original Italian movement provides the opportunity to address a number of issues associated with alternative practices to neoliberal globalization.     

HIGHWAY INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND COUNTY EMPLOYMENT GROWTH: A DYNAMIC PANEL REGRESSION ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT This paper uses recent advances in dynamic panel econometrics to examine the impact of highway infrastructure on aggregate county‐level employment using data for all 100 North Carolina counties from 1985 through 1997. Results are compared to models that do not take endogeneity of highway investment and dynamics of employment adjustment into account. Fully specified dynamic models are found to give insignificant results compared to these other models. Thus, when these issues are properly modeled, the results show that improvements in highways have no discernible impact on employment.     

The changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector in metropolitan and rural regions, 1976–1997

This paper documents the changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector over a 22‐year period (1976–1997). It does so by looking at the shifts in employment and differences in production worker wages across different levels of the rural/urban hierarchy—central cities, adjacent suburbs, medium and small cities and rural areas. The analysis demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in manufacturing employment were from the central cities of large metropolitan regions to their suburbs. Paralleling trends in the United States, rural regions of Canada have increased their share of manufacturing employment. Rising rural employment shares were due to declining employment shares of small cities and, to a lesser degree, large urban regions. Increasing rural employment was particularly prominent in Quebec, where employment shifted away from the Montreal region. The changing fortunes of rural and urban areas were not the result of across‐the‐board shifts in manufacturing employment, but were the net outcome of differing locational patterns across industries. In contrast to the situation in the United States, wages in Canada do not consistently decline, moving down the rural/urban hierarchy from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the country. Only after controlling for the types of manufacturing industries found in rural and urban regions is it apparent that wages decline with the size of place .     

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.     

The influence of the 'spaces of everyday life' on pregnancy health

Given the recent focus of medical geography on the social influences of health and illness, this paper draws upon a socio‐theoretical framework to show the link between pregnancy health and the spaces of everyday life. The health of pregnant women is becoming increasingly important given that 85 percent of women work during their pregnancy. Employment during pregnancy is consistently linked with good health for infants; however, large discrepancies exist on the effects for employed mothers. This study estimates the health effect of women's employment during pregnancy with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Findings show that women's involvement in paid employment has a beneficial impact for infants compared to women not involved in paid labour. Women who work one job or more per week experience more health problems than women who work less than one job per week. Finally, women who work in male‐dominated and gender‐neutral workspaces experience significantly more prenatal problems than women in female‐dominated workspaces. In conclusion, there is evidence to support that differences in employment status, number of workplaces involved in and gendered workspaces influence the experience of health and illness that are negotiated in the spaces of everyday life.     

Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance

This paper is concerned with the various ways in which geographical imaginations are inflected in politics. It draws on examples from a three‐way partnership of civil society organisations based in Mumbai, India. This movement seeks to reconfigure the governance of anti‐poverty strategies by placing "poor people" at the centre of its activities. The partnership, which refers to itself as the Alliance , is involved in the mobilisation and creation of a range of alternative geographical imaginations that are inflected in the production of new spaces of political engagement. By exploring two of the Alliance's strategies—enumerations and exhibitions—I will illustrate some of the ways in which these alternative geographical imaginations feature in the creation of spaces of political engagement. These strategies involve the practical demonstration of the capacities of the poor to donors and states, and reflect a particular conception of the poor and social change.
The spaces of political engagement formed in part through the Alliance's work depend significantly on a commitment to non‐party alignment, an approach that has received criticism from NGOs and commentators involved with urban poverty. I will argue that the Alliance represents a broad development alternative—rather than a form of alternative development—which nonetheless is making substantial progress in the politics of citizenship in Mumbai.     

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.     

Diversity and employment growth in Canada, 1971–2001: can diversification policies succeed?

In this paper, we explore the link between diversity in the local economy, the process of diversification and employment growth. To do so, we first examine diversification trends between 1971 and 2001 across 382 Canadian areas (urban and rural). We then examine whether or not the more diversified areas display faster employment growth. Over some periods and for some types of area they do, but over other periods they do not. Furthermore, there is no clear link between the process of diversification and growth. Also, proximity to a large diversified economic unit (metropolitan areas) tends to be associated with growth; thus, it is not only the local characteristics of regions that determine their growth levels. Our evidence suggests that economies associated with diversity can occur concurrently with economies associated with specialisation. In the light of these complex relationships, we conclude that diversification policies are difficult to justify on the grounds of employment growth and would in any case be difficult to implement successfully due to the overall inertia observed in diversity levels.     

A ROBUST APPROACH TO PREDICTING FLUCTUATIONS IN STATE-LEVEL EMPLOYMENT GROWTH*

ABSTRACT. Economic forecasting models are famous for performing well over short time periods and then suffering rapidly deteriorating performance when economic conditions change. This behavior makes composite forecasting models valuable in situations where large forecast errors cause considerable losses. A composite forecasting model for state-level employment is proposed here. This method is designed to protect state budget processes by producing robust forecasts of changes in employment and the related revenue collections. An application to Georgia nonagricultural employment is presented which demonstrates the benefits of this technique. The example shows that the method can forecast such series accurately without the forecaster having to choose in advance a single model specification to all economic conditions.     

Re‐phasing Neoliberalism: New Labour and Britain's Crisis of Street Homelessness

In this paper we continue the task of fleshing out understandings of "actually existing neoliberalism". More specifically, drawing on the work of Tom Ling, we suggest that Peck and Tickell's recent distinction between periods of roll‐back/roll‐out neoliberalisation can usefully be supplemented by the identification of a second, more powerful moment of roll‐out neoliberalism—described by Ling in terms of the shift from a system of governance to one of "governmentality". Illustrating our argument with an analysis of changing central government responses to a crisis of street homelessness in 1990s Britain, however, we draw attention to the uneven and often contrary effects of recent government policy in this field. The paper therefore concludes with a warning of the need to temper a reading of the juggernaut of roll‐out neoliberalism with an awareness of the incomplete and plain "messy" character of actually existing neoliberalisation.     

Making Space for “Neo‐communitarianism”? The Third Sector,State and Civil Society in the UK

During the 1990s the urban became an important "institutional laboratory" for state‐initiated policy experiments to address the social costs and political repercussions of economic polarisation and social exclusion associated with neo‐liberalism. One such policy experiment has been neo‐communitarianism, emphasising the contribution of the "third sector" to improving social welfare and reinvigorating a sense of civil society. Focusing on the UK, I examine the background to and implications of the emergence of a neo‐communitarian strategy under the "new" Labour government, which came to power in 1997. First, I consider the repositioning of the third sector within contemporary policy discourse as a result of the Labour government's programme of welfare reforms and Prime Minister Blair's "Third Way" political philosophy, which attempts to combine neo‐liberalism with a neo‐communitarian stance of stressing the importance of civil society for social cohesion. Then, I draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to examine how Labour's neo‐communitarian agenda has involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the governance of the third sector, centred on the creation of government–voluntary sector "compacts" at national and local levels. These compacts are of strategic importance for the restructuring of the UK third sector and so the local implications of such restructuring are then considered. In particular, case study evidence from Glasgow is used to critically evaluate government claims that the third sector can contribute to the "reinvigoration of civic life" by highlighting the importance of the internal characteristics and political environment of local third sector organisations for the differential development of social capital and citizenship.     

Pricing, Capacity Choice, and Financing in Transportation Networks

Abstract.  This paper explores interrelations between pricing, capacity choice, and financing in transportation networks. We build on the Mohring‐Harwitz result on self‐financing of optimally designed and priced roads and investigate it in a network environment under various types of second‐best regulation. A small network model with endogenous car ownership demonstrates that optimal congestion pricing and capacity choice over an entire network may cause user prices to increase more in initially mildly congested areas compared to heavily congested areas. Furthermore, a flat kilometer charge under optimal capacity choice may result in first‐best efficiency gains.     

The open black box: the role of the end‐user in GIS integration

Formalist theories of knowledge that underpin GIS scholarship on integration neglect the importance and creativity of end‐users in knowledge construction. This has practical consequences for the success of large distributed databases that contribute to spatial‐data infrastructures. Spatial‐data infrastructures depend on participation at local levels, such as counties and watersheds, and they must be developed to support feedback from local users. Looking carefully at the work of scientists in a watershed in Puget Sound, Washington, USA during the salmon crisis reveals that the work of these end‐users articulates different worlds of knowledge. This view of the user is consonant with recent work in science and technology studies and research into computer‐supported cooperative work. GIS theory will be enhanced when it makes room for these users and supports their practical work .     

Force Reduction, Base Closure, and the Indirect Effects of Military Installations on Local Employment Growth

Abstract This study examines the indirect effects of military installations on county–level private employment, and specifically the special cases of base closure under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) proceedings of 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995. Local employment impacts are considered within a partial adjustment construct of the changes model, a specification that facilitates the decomposition of defense personnel changes into their positive, negative, and BRAC–related components. The latter two components are subsequently examined for asymmetric effects attributable to ordinary force drawdown on the one hand, and base closure on the other. Also considered are the specific effects of direct federal assistance as well as facilities conversion and reutilization within BRAC communities.     

THE EFFECTS OF TAXES,EXPENDITURES, AND PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE ON METROPOLITAN AREA EMPLOYMENT*

ABSTRACT. Data for 28 metropolitan areas over a 15-year period are used to determine the impacts of government spending, taxes, and public infrastructure on total employment and disaggregated employment. After carefully controlling for the government budget constraint we find that taxes are negatively related to total employment and education spending is positively related to total employment. Nevertheless, we find that it is difficult for metropolitan areas to influence the composition of their employment with government tax and expenditure policies. Moreover, at current levels of public infrastructure, marginal changes in infrastructure have no strong effect on employment.     

Hydrothermal fluid flow models of stratiform ore genesis in the McArthur Basin, Northern Territory, Australia

This paper explores the role of basin‐scale fluid migration in stratiform Pb–Zn ore formation in the southern McArthur Basin, Australia. Mathematical models are presented for coupled brine migration and heat transport in the basin. The models account for: (i) topographically driven flow (forced convection) during periods when parts of the McArthur Basin were subaerial and elevated above the central Batten Fault Zone; (ii) density‐driven flow (free convection) during periods when the basin was mostly submarine; and (iii) transient flows associated with fault rupture during periods of transpression. These hydrologic models help to compare and contrast a variety of hypotheses concerning deep fluid migration and the origin of base metal ores in the McArthur Basin. The numerical results exhibit a strong structural control on fluid flow caused by the north‐trending fault systems that characterize the Batten Fault Zone. As a result, fluids descend to depths of a few kilometers along the western side, migrate laterally to the east through the clastic and volcanic aquifers of the upper Tawallah and lowest McArthur Groups, and then ascend along the eastern side of the fault zone. This recharge–discharge pattern dominates all of the hydrogeologic models. The basin‐wide flow pattern suggests that Na–Ca–Cl brines acquired base metals in the deepest levels of the basin stratigraphy as the fluids migrated eastwards through the aquifer system. Upward flow was relatively rapid along the Emu Fault Zone, so much so that fluid temperatures likely approached 130°C in the muddy sediments near the sea floor due to upward flow and venting at the HYC (‘Here’s Your Chance'). Transient pulses of flow characterized periods of transpressional stress and subsequent faulting may have punctuated the basin history. Large‐scale free convection, however, characterized notably long periods of diagenesis and ore mineralization during the Proterozoic in the McArthur Basin.     

Plant Scale, Industry Agglomeration, and the Outlook for Regional Employment in Central European Economies

A common outcome among Central European transition economies is the significant variation in regional unemployment rates, a condition symptomatic of allocative inefficiency in the labor market. Several studies attribute such variation, at least in part, to large vertically integrated industrial complexes erected during the period of central planning, and in turn to subsequent employment adjustment that operates to the disadvantage of local workers during transition. In this study I provide a test of this hypothesis by examining the correlates of local employment change at the outset of reforms, and specifically adjustment triggered by extreme variation in local plant size and scale externalities.