Guided by empirical observation of recent downtown redevelopment, we conduct spatial analysis between urban vibrancy and economic growth at the census tract level. To measure the level of urban ...vibrancy of live work and play environments, we rely on the Environmental Protection Agency's Smart Location Database with measures of density, land use diversity, urban design, distance to transit, and destination accessibility. We further measure economic growth by the concentration of high-growth firms and employ descriptive statistics and spatial regressions to analyze the correlations. We first find the presence of vibrant centers in both urban and suburban areas. More important, we observe that vibrant centers have captured more of these high-growth firms. These results suggest the need for more refined theoretical and empirical analysis of urban vibrancy, economic development, and place attractiveness at the intrametropolitan scale.
Finding a definitive answer to the question of whether fiscal redistribution is harmful or beneficial for regional economic performance is not straightforward. This paper disentangles the key ...components of fiscal redistribution in a regional Canada-US setting. Redistributive spending is calibrated as the difference between pretax personal income, and personal income after federal taxes and transfers. Based largely on fixed effects and dynamic panel methods, our findings support the battery of studies on the mixed evidence concerning the relationship between fiscal redistribution and per capita income. To the extent that results are sensitive to estimation methods and functional specifications, the study underscores the importance of unbundling the components of a redistributive fiscal package in a bid to establish optimal thresholds for effective policy interventions.
Since the 1970s, due to the combination of the declining birthrate and rising longevity, the speed of population aging in Japan has been more dramatic than in any other developed country. ...Consequently, the growth of the working population, which had been faster than the growth of the total population, has gradually become slower in recent years than the latter in Japan. Moreover, similar rapid demographic changes are taking place at various speeds in all prefectures. By introducing demographic variables into empirical models of regional economic growth, which is based on prefecture-level panel data for the period 1980–2010, this paper shows that the recent demographic changes in Japan have had significant effects on its regional economic growth: the contribution of the growth rate difference between the working population and the total population to per capita Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP) growth rate, i.e., the demographic bonus, has disappeared. In addition, the growth rate of the aged population (65 years old and over) has had a very significant negative effect on per capita GRDP growth rate, while the growth rate of the young population aged 0–14 has had a significant positive effect. The findings of this study imply that Japan’s population aging and other ongoing demographic changes will continue to depress economic growth in all prefectures. Given the low probability of a significant rise in the birth rate and the rapid increase in the local labor supply, it is important for all prefectures in Japan to raise the quality of their labor-force and improve productivity. Meanwhile, effectively attracting young skilled workers to migrate from other regions/countries should be a key policy issue for both local and central governments in Japan.
The identification of regional economic disparities and their extent is an important factor affecting regional development policy formulation. In this work we propose an alternative, multivariate ...statistical methodology for evaluation of level of economic development of districts in Serbia, and their classification in homogeneous groups, based on five economic indicators. First, the new composite indicator for measuring economic development level (IED) is created using factor analysis, and then the districts were classified according to the obtained IED values. The evaluation of structural quality of thus formed groups was conducted using the non-hierarchical clustering procedure. The approach presented in this paper takes account of statistical assumptions on which the valid application of multivariate methods is based, which makes it advantageous over the current approaches in the literature. The resulting categorization into three district groups clearly confirms the presence of very pronounced regional economic disparities between the less developed districts in southern and eastern part and more developed districts in northern part of Serbia. Districts with city of Belgrade and Novi Sad occupy the dominant positions compared to other districts.
Based on panel data from 2000 to 2017 on 30 provinces in China, we analyse the threshold effect of environmental regulation on the quality improvement of economic growth in Eastern, Central, and ...Western China using a threshold regression model with entrepre-neurship as the threshold variable. The conclusions are as follows: (1) With a low entre-preneurship index, environmental regulation inhibits the quality of regional economic growth. When the entrepreneurship index is at a middle level, the effect changes from an original adverse impact to a favourable impact, which is very significant in Eastern and Western China, but not significant in Central China. When entrepreneurship is highly active, environmental regulation is beneficial to economic growth quality in all regions, and environmental regulation can bring into play the function of "reversed mechanism" to promote economic growth quality. (2) The differences in entrepreneurship level in the three regions lead to regional heterogeneity of the threshold effect between environmental regulation and economic growth quality. Eastern China realizes a double dividend of environmental improvement and economic growth. The entrepreneurial activity in the Central and Western regions is a little far away from their threshold values, at which environmental regulation can produce a significant incentive effect. In conclusion, we put forward three suggestions to improve the entrepreneurial activity and fully realize the double dividend of environmental improvement and economic growth.
This study examines the effects of government investment on private capital formation, considering both regional and sectoral distinctions in Japan. The empirical results show that a crowding-out ...effect is observed in rural areas for several industries that contribute to regional economic growth. This suggests that the allocation of public stimulus investment packages to stagnant regions in Japan might act as a regional growth constraint as well as an obstacle to the capital formation, and stagnant regions cannot evade the stagnation even if the central government plans economic stimuli toward such regions, including public investment.
To explore the contradictions and problems apparent in contemporary policy towards universities, this article reviews two parallel but related debates: the debate about competitive and prosperous ...regions and the debate about excellent institutions of research and higher education. It questions whether it is necessary, or always healthy, to conflate the processes behind excellence in regional innovation and economic development with excellence in university research, education and collaboration. In other words, while we agree that universities contribute to innovation, it is less clear how they contribute to regional innovation and still less clear how they contribute to regional innovation systems.
This paper analyses relations between sub-national institutional actors responsible for the attraction and retention of foreign direct investment, other ‘governance’ actors in regional business ...systems – local and sub-regional government, cluster/sectoral bodies, RDA and LEP executives, and those involved in the coordination of skills provision – and subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. It is based on qualitative research in two regions of England conducted between 2008 and 2011. Within a context of international competition for investment within global production networks, it explores recent politically driven changes in sub-national governance, including the abolition of Regional Development Agencies, alongside the more long-standing instability of economic development and skills coordination in England. The analysis is centred on an argument that a more adequate understanding of sub-national economic governance requires the active integration of perspectives on political systems of governance, and embedded patterns of economic coordination, as analysed in the varieties of capitalism literature.
Smart Specialization Strategy (S3) has become a dominant regional economic development field with significant policy traction, in particular within the European Union. However, questions are being ...raised about its operationalization and a gap has been identified with respect to the role of innovation intermediaries' interventions in support of the developing regional-sectoral innovation systems. In particular, reasons for diverging policy approaches of "niche specialization" versus "regional advantage" in comparable situations should be examined to illuminate the contextual factors impacting the interpretation of the intermediaries' mandates. In this paper, the cases of two leading investments in innovation intermediation in the emerging New Space sector are analyzed (Space-SI and Higgs Centre for Innovation) in two EU NUTS level 1 regions (Slovenia and Scotland), which were previously peripheral players in this technological domain. In particular, using a novel innovation intermediation interventions' classification, this paper identifies the difference between research and development (R&D) and business development (BD) support foci in the two locales, noting some of the contextual factors associated with them and arguing for the long-term balancing of the two approaches.
This paper introduces the rationale for the special issue and its contributions, which bridge the literature on regional development and the Triple Helix model. The concept of the Triple Helix at the ...sub-national, and specifically regional, level is established and examined, with special regard to regional economic development founded on innovation and research activities. The discussion on regional competitiveness lays the foundations for the exploration of contrasting environments, sectors and administrations. The authors offer a framework that captures the array of institutions, driving factors, players and powers active at the regional level. This introductory paper presents and summarizes the articles that follow, emphasizing their contribution to the literature. It shows how the various contributions exploit the Triple Helix model to analyse policy delivery at a regional level, and describes how other models and characterizations of interactions and collaborations between institutions are being associated with the Triple Helix concept, highlighting both their shortcomings and the way they enrich its application.
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