Earthquakes,grants, and public expenditure: How municipalities respond to natural disasters

We analyze the response of municipalities to the occurrence of natural disasters in terms of spending behavior, use of upper-tier transfers and recovery, using balance sheet data of about 8,000 Italian municipalities for the period 2000–2015, and the universe of earthquakes events. We find evidence of increasing expenditure for about 12 years after the shocks, with asymmetric responses between earthquake-related and unconditional grants, and heterogeneous flypaper effects across the country. While in northern municipalities expenditure tends to regress to pre-earthquake levels, southern municipalities stick to higher expenditure levels when grants drop. This evidence is coupled with a faster recovery of private income and housing prices in northern municipalities.     

A Postcolonial Critique of Community Energy: Searching for Community as Solidarity in India and Scotland

Community renewable energy (CRE) represents a growing empirical and academic turn towards community‐based sustainability and climate change interventions. This paper brings together postcolonial theory and CRE for the first time to outline fundamental tensions in the conceptualisation and application of the idea of community. The understanding of community within the CRE discourse is largely: (1) location‐based; and/or (2) a community of choice that is consciously opted into. Driven by postcolonial theory, this paper counterpoises both as a form of community as contract against an idea of community as solidarity. Its central thesis is that actually existing community, contrary to how the bulk of CRE literature commonly understands it, is a combination of bonds of solidarity and emergent purposes. The paper conceptualises community as fluid bonds of solidarity that align and realign differently around different purposes.     

Scaling just transitions: Legitimation strategies in coal phase-out commissions in Canada and Germany

Climate change mitigation triggers both spatial and moral complexities, as demonstrated by the contentious issue of phasing out coal power. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on, among other things, the acceptability of climate policy measures and thus, from a moral perspective, on the ability to organize transition processes in ways that do not damage the livelihoods of workers, communities, and entire regions. Spatially, the unequal distributions of burdens and advantages of both climate change and respective mitigation measures provoke struggles over their legitimacy in contexts ranging from local to global. Phasing out coal mining and the respective power generation capacity thus triggers processes of structural transformation that cut across geographic scales, vertical levels of policy and politics, as well as sectoral boundaries.In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, countries such as Canada and Germany have established stakeholder-driven commissions to develop proposals for just transition pathways for phasing out coal production and consumption. We argue that these commissions are arenas in which spatial, moral, and sectoral (re-)negotiations materialize. Comparing the Canadian and German stakeholder commissions through expert interviews with their members, the article traces how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies. Expectations at different levels and from different actors in turn place commission members under pressure to justify their involvement and the outputs of the commissions. We find that the Canadian task force showed greater commitment to collecting and reflecting the needs of communities in its coal regions, and to communicating these to the federal government. In the German coal commission, legitimation strategies focused mainly on a broad representation of interests, and on government spending for affected regions, workers, and industries. In that case, a compromise was reached that satisfied most, but not all, of the diverse requirements.     

The ripple effects of large-scale transport infrastructure investment

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of an asymmetric decrease in transport costs, combining a large-scale spatial dynamic general equilibrium model for 267 European NUTS-2 regions with a detailed transport model at the level of individual road segments. As a case study, we consider the impact of the road infrastructure investments in Central and Eastern Europe of the European Cohesion Policy. Our analysis suggests that the decrease in transportation costs benefits the targeted regions via substantial increases in gross domestic product (GDP) and welfare compared to the baseline, and a small increase in population. The geographic information embedded in the transport model leads to relatively large predicted benefits in peripheral countries such as Greece and Finland, which hardly receive funds, but whose trade links cross Central and Eastern Europe, generating profit from the investments there. The richer, Western European nontargeted regions also enjoy a higher GDP after the investment in the East, but these effects are smaller. Thus, the policy reduces interregional disparities. There are rippled patterns in the predicted policy spillovers. In nontargeted countries, regions trading more intensely with regions where the investment is taking place on average benefit more compared to other regions within the same country, but also compared to neighboring regions across an international border. We uncover that regions importing goods from Central and Eastern Europe enjoy the largest spillovers. These regions become more competitive and expand exports, to the detriment of other regions in the same country.     

Inter- and intraregional inequality in a spatial economy

In this paper, we develop a three-region economic geography model with workers of heterogeneous skills and mobility rates to consider how first-nature, regional differences impact both inter- and intraregional inequality. In our model, the skill premium within a region summarizes both the degree of intraregional inequality between mobile, skilled workers and immobile, unskilled workers and the interregional inequality through differences in the welfare of unskilled workers across regions. Regions with the highest skill premium have the greatest degree of intraregional inequality and provide the lowest level of welfare to unskilled workers, relative to other regions. We find that the skill premium will be higher in regions with a greater supply of unskilled labor, lower supply of housing, or are more remote. An increase in a region's housing supply or centrality will lower intraregional inequality and raise the welfare of the local, unskilled workforce. However, the magnitude of these changes are declining in the initial number of skilled workers in the region. The model is extended to consider imperfectly elastic housing supply. The larger the price elasticity of housing, the larger the range of values, such that more populated regions will host a disproportionate share of skilled workers, have lower levels of intraregional inequality, and provide higher levels of welfare for unskilled workers.     

Patterns of exchange and the social production of pigs in highland new guinea: Their relevance to questions about the origins and evolution of agriculture

In recent years, cultural anthropologists have made notable progress in understanding the bewildering variety of material exchange transactions found among the aboriginal populations of highland New Guinea. One of the major findings of this work is that competitive exchange behavior may bring in its wake alterations in agronomic practices involving an intensification of production. That intensification is primarily a product of social behavior, rather than an adaptation to climate change or population pressure, is a significant conclusion that should influence the thinking of archaeologists as they investigate past episodes of agronomic change, including the origins of agriculture.     

Renewable energy innovations and sustainability transition: How relevant are spatial spillovers?

In the societal challenge to switch to renewable energy, innovation has become an ever‐increasing critical determinant. However, while sustainability transition is a global challenge, diffusion and adoption of innovation tends to be uneven in space and unequal access may cause substantial heterogeneity in energy transition. This research analyzes how domestic and foreign innovation activities in the renewable energy sector influence energy transition over time. Empirical testing shows that a country's domestic innovation activity impacts renewable electricity generation capacity sooner than foreign technological innovations. I document that there are substantial barriers to substitute foreign technologies for domestic innovation efforts in the short run but also observe that foreign technologies have a stronger impact after some years. These findings have implications for cross‐border coordination of governmental innovation support and complementary policy instruments that aim at increasing adoption speed across borders.     

Innovation across cities

This paper examines the distribution of patenting activity across cities in the OECD, using a sample of 218 cities from 2000 to 2008. We obtain three main results. First, patenting activity is more concentrated than population and GDP. Second, patenting activity is less persistent than population and GDP, especially in the middle of the distribution. Third, in a parametric model, patenting does not exhibit mean‐reversion, and is positively associated with GDP and population density. Our results suggest that policymakers can influence the amount of innovative activity through the use of appropriate policies.     

Place-based innovation policy for industrial diversification in regions

New industrial innovation policies like smart specialization aim at boosting economic growth by diversification towards more complex and higher value economic activities. This paper proposes a conceptual and analytical framework to support the design and implementation of such policies considering place-specific preconditions, particularly the differentiation of the regional system of innovation and entrepreneurship and the degree of current industrial diversification. The paper expands on the links between these preconditions and the barriers and opportunities for industrial diversification. Consequently, it proposes an archetypical place-based policy framework covering overall policy objectives as well as measures at the level of actors, networks, and the institutional and organizational support structures.     

Spatial and sectoral differentiation of support to innovative companies from EU funds in Czechia

This paper aims to introduce a case study of Czechia in distribution of the EU funds and their spatial patterns. EU funds receive plenty attention from both European society and the scientific community. However, there is a lack of detailed evaluations of spatial and sectoral differentiation, which might bring a better understanding to the whole EU funds system. This paper attempts to fill this gap with a method of geographical differentiation analysis of the Czech operational programme Enterprise and Innovations 2007–15, which should increase the competitiveness of industry and develop services for commercial activities. Historically, subsidies often go to peripheral regions at the borderland with Slovakia and Poland, while regions along the borders with Germany and Austria receive only a low level of support. Jurisdictions of the major recipients from hi-tech sectors are mainly in the close vicinity of the largest cities (Praha, Brno), which are natural centres of high technologically demanding sectors, but a high share of high-tech subsidies goes to some peripheral districts as well. These findings can contribute not only to the academic discussion about contradictory developmental impacts of subsidies but to the all-European debate on the EU funds purposes as well.