MEASURES OF DIVERSIFICATION: PREDICTORS OF REGIONAL ECONOMIC INSTABILITY*

This work focuses on determining which measure of regional economic diversification best explains differences in economic instability across regions. One recent article found that a portfolio variance measure had the highest explanatory power. Another researcher found that an entropy measure was best after the model was corrected for heteroscedasticity. Results presented here indicate that, after correction for heteroscedasticity, portfolio variance once again displays the greatest power to explain cross-sectional variation in observed regional instability.     

'The Proliferation of Identity Politics in Australia': A Critique

It is good to see more work being done on the institutionalising of ‘identity politics’, as in Elizabeth Fells' article ‘The Proliferation of Identity Politics in Australia’ in the March 2003 issue of this journal (Fells 2003). However, some assumptions in that article result in seriously misleading conclusions. I examine these here, taking the example of women's portfolios. Fells uses allocation of ministerial portfolios as an indicator of government responses to identity politics and, following Moon and Fletcher (1988), of policy innovation and policy substance. She acknowledges that governments may respond to demands that they be active in a particular area by creating portfolio responsibilities without establishing separate ministries. She suggests, however, that failure to establish a separate ministry to support the portfolio could be seen as a failure to ‘institutionalise a long-term commitment’. Hence she announces her intention to exclude from her analysis the creation of portfolios without ministries, such as the Commonwealth Status of Women portfolio, for which both the Prime Minister and a Minister Assisting the Prime Minister have responsibility (Fells 2003, 104).     

RISK AND INCOME TRADEOFFS IN REGIONAL POLICY: A PORTFOLIO THEORETIC APPROACH*

ABSTRACT. Policy makers often try to raise a region's income by altering its industrial mix. However, such attempts to increase local income may have an adverse effect on the stability of the region's economy. In this paper, we develop single-, aggregate-, and multiregional portfolio models that can be used by policy makers to generate frontiers of risk/income-efficient industrial mixtures for a regional economy. These portfolio models are modified for application to the tourist industry in six regions of Spain. In practice, we find that the introduction of bounds on the magnitude of sector rebalancing has a major effect on the model solutions.     

REGIONAL INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH AND INSTABILITY*

ABSTRACT. National and regional employment patterns are subject to growth-instability tradeoffs. This paper applies the portfolio selection model to detailed employment data for the U.S. economy and selected states. Empirical results indicate that growth-instability trade-offs exist in a form not previously understood. The paper also identifies growth and stabilization potential by identifying stabilizing sectors.     

Inga Clendinnen,Historian (1934–2016)

Inga Clendinnen has been described as an anthropologist, a public intellectual, a writer, a poet in prose, a Mesoamericanist, and a student of the Holocaust and Australia. She was all this, but she insisted that she was always and mainly a historian. A cultural historian without portfolio, I would say. This essay aims to introduce her written work as a whole, its main purposes, themes, and approach.     

Critical Assessment of Intensity Measures for Seismic Response of Italian RC Bridge Portfolios

The seismic assessment of a road network depends largely on the characterization of the fragility of its bridge components. The accuracy of bridge seismic demand estimates and the use of proper intensity measures (IM) will significantly influence such task. The available literature has mainly focused on buildings or a limited number of bridge configurations and IMs, which may not be representative for bridge portfolio assessment studies. In this paper, the correlation quality between a larger pool of traditional and innovative IMs and the nonlinear dynamic response of typical Italian RC bridges is investigated to identify the best-performing IMs.     

我国旅游资源、区位和入境旅游收入的空间错位分析

旅游资源和区位是影响区域入境旅游发展的两大基本要素。本文以我国大陆31个省区为区域研究单元,借用重力模型和二维组合矩阵方法,分析了旅游资源、区位和入境旅游收入三者之间的空间错位现象。结果发现：（1）区位指数和入境旅游收入指数重心偏向我国东部地区,旅游资源丰度指数重心偏向中西部地区;（2）资源与收入、区位与收入、资源与区位三组二维组合关系均存在明显的空间错位,可以将这种二维组合关系划分为五种类型来描述各省区的旅游发展现状。     

SPECIFICATION AND ECONOMETRIC IMPROVEMENTS IN REGIONAL PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT. We develop an alternative specification of the regional portfolio diversification problem that explicitly incorporates important information on regional economic structure and avoids certain inconsistencies in the traditional specification with respect to what constitutes the choice set. We also implement improved econometric procedures for estimating the required parameters and provide an empirical example using 1987 data for the Colorado economy to illustrate the potential differences in sectoral allocations obtained when applying our alternative approach versus the traditional one.     

THE TREATMENT OF MONEY IN REGIONAL ECONOMICS

ABSTRACT. A survey of regional monetary theory suggests a regional segmentation of financial markets on the basis of differences in portfolio preference, or market imperfections. These possibilities are explored here using post-Keynesian monetary theory. It is concluded that the availability of credit to a region depends more on the (potentially volatile) degree of confidence in the regional economy. The amount of liquidity thus generated depends on the propensity for capital flight due to liquidity preference. The resulting tendency for regions attracting low degrees of confidence to experience liquidity shortage will be greater the more integrated the national banking system.     

Livelihoods Limitations: The Political Economy of Urban Poverty in Dhaka,Bangladesh

Research in Bangladesh reveals the limitations of actor‐oriented frameworks for understanding urban poverty that assess household livelihoods on the basis of a household's portfolio of assets or capitals. The narrow focus of these frameworks on households and their depoliticized definition of social capital overlook the political roots of urban poverty. The informal systems of governance that dominate resource distribution within low‐income settlements ensure that the social resources necessary for long‐term household improvement are confined to a small elite. Only through extending our analysis beyond the household level, to explore their position within this local political economy of employment and enterprise, can we recognize the limitations placed on household efforts to improve their livelihoods.     

Regional Economy Size and the Growth–Instability Frontier: Evidence from Europe

Predictions of the portfolio model of the economy are tested using regional growth data from Europe. It is shown that more aggregated regions of Europe tend to be more economically diverse than more disaggregated regions. Then, using different frontier estimation methods, evidence of a convex growth–instability frontier for aggregated regions is presented. At the most regionally disaggregated level for which there are data, there is weak if any evidence of the frontier. The results suggest that large economies are appropriately modeled as portfolios, whose growth processes are characterized by the convex growth–instability frontier, whereas small local economies do not display this characteristic.     

Geographies of relational coordination in venture capital firms

ABSTRACT

Venture capital (VC) firms are crucial actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Through the development towards a digital economy, they have gained further relevance, which caused the VC industry to diversify in terms of business models. This article offers a new heuristic to study the VC industry by developing a classification of VC firms. By drawing on a framework of different dimensions of relational distance in investment relations, different types of relational coordination are identified by comparing VC firms in Germany. The types of VC business models are found to produce relational geographies of investing as they relate with their portfolio startups in different ways. A relational perspective on VC thus provides the opportunity to step beyond pure territorial approaches on VC.     

Scientific knowledge production in European regions: patterns of growth,diversity and complexity

ABSTRACT

We study regional patterns of scientific knowledge production in Europe using all scientific publications in the period 2000–2014 attributed to 813 scientific subfields. We show that the existing scientific portfolio of regions offers opportunities for related diversification and discourages the creation of knowledge on topics unrelated to the local knowledge base. Many lagging regions show clear growth, but complex knowledge production remains highly concentrated in regions in the North and West of Europe. For lagging regions there are advantages in not specializing too soon and to first diversify before moving into developing more complex knowledge.     

Middle-class childhood and parenting culture in high-rise Hong Kong: on scheduled lives,the school trap and a new urban idyll

This exploratory study seeks to understand childhood in Hong Kong in relation to the high-rise living environment and dominant parenting culture among middle-class professionals. The empirical results suggest that it is parenting culture rather than the built environment that creates children's busy, scheduled lives, high levels of adult supervision and limited outdoor play. Building on a strong portfolio is considered to be both necessary to enter the popular British educational system and to counterbalance a curriculum that is supposed to offer less structured learning compared to the local Cantonese schools. It is argued that this paradoxical situation must be understood in the context of parents' personal childhood histories and the highly competitive global labour market in Hong Kong. The paper ends with a reflection on new discourses of childhood that creates cities and its many consumption spaces as urban idylls for raising children.     

Renegotiating the Reproductive Bargain: Gender Analysis of Economic Transition in Cuba in the 1990s

This article argues that Cuba's economic demise following the collapse of the former Soviet Union should be seen as a crisis in reproduction as well as a crisis in consumption and production. Using qualitative field research carried out in 1994 and 1995 in Havana and in the province of Matanzas, the author shows that the commodities and services required for reproduction could no longer be guaranteed through the distribution system of the Cuban state. Consequently, people began to devise a range of survival strategies in order to ensure the reproduction of their households, including trading in unofficial markets, leaving formal employment and engaging in a portfolio of income-generating activities in the informal sector. Such strategies were patterned by the existing sexual division of labour and show a reinforcement of traditional gender roles. The article argues that these changes will have important political as well as economic consequences for Cuba's future.     

The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence

This article examines the relationship between gender and the human through the lens of humanitarianism, whose key mission is to protect ‘humanity’. More specifically, it traces the recent history of the entry of gender‐based violence into the medical humanitarian portfolio, quickly becoming the poster‐child for humanitarian aid. The article argues that this unprecedented attention to gender‐based violence, and its incorporation into the mandate of humanitarians and their mission to protect a universal humanity, works to medicalise and depoliticise the issue, limiting the ability to address violence in all its manifestations. The article also suggests that paying attention to the details of this attempted incorporation, and its ultimate failure, actually offers us something more important and interesting to think with: it opens the way to new possibilities for the political, and hence for addressing such forms of violence and inequality.     

Composition,Similarity, and the Measurement of Economic Homogeneity*

Abstract. The concept of economic homogeneity in regional science is based on two very different notions: composition and similarity. In the case of the states of the US, measures of homogeneity based on these different notions are negatively correlated with each other, suggesting that the results of studies that use measures of economic homogeneity are likely to be sensitive to the conceptual basis of the specific measure. In order to overcome this problem, a portfolio‐theoretic measure of economic homogeneity with some attractive properties is presented. It is naturally decomposable into two components reflecting each of these notions and easy to construct using widely available data. Using this measure, patterns of homogeneity for the states of the US are illustrated and discussed, and hypotheses about the relationship between homogeneity and economic instability are tested.     

Keeping the Gates? Women as Ministers in Australia, 1970-96

Contrary to expectations based on 1980s west-European research, women's representation in Australian cabinets over the last quarter century has exceeded their proportional strength in parliaments. The paper examines this and canvasses explanations. Consistent with west-European findings, Australian women ministers are overrepresented in social portfolio areas and underrepresented in defining and physical resource mobilisation areas. The paper considers implications and explanations of women's work in cabinet. 'There are only two ways of getting into the Cabinet. One way is to crawl up the staircase of preferment on your belly; the other way is to kick them in the teeth.' Aneurin Bevan quoted in Hennessy (1986, 94)     

Dispossession 1990s style: Aborigines,islanders and the policy making process of the Goss labor government

Aboriginal and Islander people in Queensland remain unempowered in the policy making process of government. This is achieved by downgrading and under‐resourcing the relevant portfolio, by co‐locating it with welfare, by giving other departments statutory rights in decision making on indigenous issues which are not reciprocal, by relocating key indigenous policy areas into otherwise antagonistic departments, by ghettoising the issues in Cabinet and by failing to elucidate clear policy guidelines on indigenous issues. The Goss government has also ensured that indigenous people remain unempowered outside of government by failing to legislate for regional land councils, Aboriginal majority on national parks boards of management and an Aboriginal‐controlled statutory acquisitions fund and by retaining excessive discretionary power in the administration of the 1991 Land Acts.     

Technology Transfer and Public Policy

This article uses events occurring between 1989 and 1994 at the University of California (UC) as a case study to illustrate the consequences to the university of the collision between two powerful public policy agendas for the university: (a) that it maintain its traditional independence, carrying out its roles of teaching and research untainted by the lures and demands of the marketplace, and (b) that it become more active in economic development activities, including the development and sale of its intellectual property and the establishment of companies to exploit university research. The unsuccessful attempts over these five years by the UC to establish a separate nonprofit foundation to manage its considerable portfolio of intellectual property and to form a for-profit company to fund development and start-up efforts have been plagued with controversy. UC's story offers parallels with the experiences of other universities and illustrates an emerging pattern in the responses of higher education to the new pressures on them to be more economically relevant. The lessons from the UC case are valuable for other universities and for policymakers involved in technology transfer activities.