TRANSPORTATION RATES AND LOCATION OF THE FIRM: A COMPARATIVE STATIC ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of the structure of transportation rates in the Weber-Moses triangle model. It shows that, in Zeigler's analysis, the appearance of the price elasticities of demand for inputs actually vanish by a simple application of the envelope theorem. Applying comparative statics analysis, we show when transportation rates are a function of quantity and distance, the assumptions that the production function is homogeneous of degree one and the transportation rates elasticities with respect to quantity and distance are constant are not sufficient to insure that the optimum location is independent of the level of output. This result is significantly different from that obtained by either Miller and Jensen or Zeigler.     

PROSPECTS OF VILLAGE DEATH IN ILAHITA

The history of settlement in Ilahita village, an Arapesh community in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, is pronounced by incessant, behaviourally mediated adjustments between changing internal and external social environments. Having grown to immense size and structural complexity partly in response to Abelam encroachment and cultural exportation, Ilahita began to come apart once warfare was suppressed in the 1950s. The twin processes of social denucleation and physical disintegration have greatly accelerated during the post-independence period, as new religious, economic, and legal institutions, along with galloping population growth, combine to promote a shift from collectivist to individualist modes of social agency and identity. Despite the novelty of these circumstances, village death in Ilahita signals a reversion toward the kind of settlement which existed before the village was ever born. The case of Ilahita is presented for its ethnographic interest and as an illustration of settlement dynamics which perhaps occur more generally under Melanesian social, cultural and historical conditions.     

The use of soil chemistry data to address post-mortem diagenesis in bone mineral

The soluble and exchangeable ions for a soil profile from the Roonka archaeological site. Lower Murray Basin, South Australia, are compared with the total elemental content of the soils. Since the chemical composition of post-mortem ionic substitution phases and secondary minerals in archaeological bone will depend on the availability of ions to the soil solution under field conditions, it is suggested that models addressing diagenesis in bone employ soluble and exchangeable ions rather than total elemental soil data.     

Evaluating Tobler's Migration Vector Fields

In the past decade Tobler has provided an innovative cartographic presentation of migration flows. The central theme of this research has been to utilize detailed migration data to reveal the underlying structures of migration flows. Even though the analyses are not explanatory models of migration exchanges, the application of these techniques to migration flows over time and across different spatial scales provides a visual generalization of often extremely complex flows. The application of his techniques at two spatial scales for the Netherlands illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of migration force fields for the analysis of migration.     

COMPACTNESS AND ELECTORAL BOUNDARY ADJUSTMENT: AN ASSESSMENT OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES

Spatial compactness has been proposed as a suitable criterion for assessing whether electoral boundaries reflect partisan interests. Although several different measures of spatial compactness have been developed, only limited efforts have been made to compare and evaluate them in the context of electoral redistricting. This paper assesses alternative spatial compactness measures and applies conceptually appealing measures to the provincial ridings proposed by British Columbia's Royal Commission on Electoral Boundaries (1988).