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.     

SPATIAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH FOOTLOOSE FIRMS*

ABSTRACT. We determine the location equilibria in a duopoly model under a novel solution concept. Typically, spatial equilibrium is described as either a simultaneous price and location game, or else as a two-stage location-then-price game. We introduce a new alternative, a two-stage price-then-location game. It is well known that no (pure strategy) equilibrium usually exists under the two standard solution concepts when products are homogeneous. We show this is also true for the new concept. We then provide numerical results for a specific functional form (the logit model) which introduces product heterogeneity into the standard framework, restoring equilibrium when the degree of substitutability between products is not too small.     

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open-ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co-optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.     

Feminine and Feminist

Book reviewed in this article: The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation, Daisy Al-Amir Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond, Joseph T. Zeidan Populism and Feminism in Iran, Haideh Moghissi