Of resilient places: planning for urban resilience

This paper argues that resilience of a place cannot necessarily be associated only with the level of its vulnerability to the environment or security. A place-based perspective to resilience helps understand the capacity of communities to withstand or adapt with change. Resilience of a place does not only refer to contingencies—such as formulating immediate responses to crisis situations or incidents such as earthquakes, floods or other disasters in vulnerable areas—but also considers long-term mitigation and adaptation strategies to face social, economic and environmental challenges. To this purpose, the paper applies an evolutionary resilience framework to the case of Transition towns in the UK as resilient places in terms of their capacity for learning, robustness, ability to innovate and adaptability to change. In conclusion, socially innovative actions and initiatives are found to be a primary source of resilience through bottom-up creativity among communities and stakeholders to help improve social relations, support socio-political empowerment and fulfil the basic needs of the people.     

Bayesian Estimation of Regional Production for CGE Modeling

Abstract Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are often criticized for using restrictive functional forms and relying on external sources for parameter values in their calibration. CGE modelers argue that in many instances reliable econometric estimates of important model parameters are unavailable because they must be estimated using small numbers of time‐series observations. To address these criticisms, this paper uses a Bayesian approach to estimate the parameters of a translog production function in a regional computable general equilibrium model. Using priors from more reliable national estimates, and parameter restrictions required by neoclassical production theory, estimation is done by Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. A stylized regional CGE model is then used to contrast policy responses of a Cobb‐Douglas specification with those from the estimated translog equation.