The optimal allocation of land resources is an important prerequisite for sustainable land use and for synergic development of regional resources-environment-economy. The question on how to optimize ...and allocate the regional land resources has become a hotspot in land use and land cover change studies. However, the allocative efficiency of China’s construction land is currently a rather rudimentary and subjective issue. This study used an extended Cobb-Douglas production function to measure the allocative efficiency of construction land at the national and regional levels using balanced provincial panel data from the 1985–2014 period. The results showed that China’s construction land has exhibited a significant increasing trend over the past three decades, and its growth rate in the central region was relatively higher than that in the eastern and western regions. There is little or no available arable land that can be occupied by construction uses in China’s economically developed provinces. Further investigations demonstrated that capital, labor and land investment all contributed to the non-agricultural GDP growth in China. The allocative efficiency of construction land in the eastern region was greater than that in the central and western regions. The efficiency of construction land allocation in China needs to be further improved, and the intensive utilization of land resource is necessary, particularly in the context of China’s “new normal” economy. Because of the regional disparities in the efficiency of construction land allocation, formulating specific region-oriented land use planning may be more urgent. These findings can provide policymakers with a sound basis for land use and urban planning.
McCann P. and Ortega-Argilés R. Smart specialization, regional growth and applications to European Union Cohesion policy, Regional Studies. The aim of this paper is to achieve two objectives. ...Firstly, it examines the smart specialization concept and explains the challenges involved in applying this originally sectoral concept to an explicitly spatial and regional setting. Secondly, it explains the ways in which this might be achieved so as to make the concept suitable as a building block of a reformed European Union cohesion policy.
Ecological degradation has become one of the constraints on the development of human society. To deal with pollutant emissions, governments around the world have implemented emission trading schemes ...(ETS). However, although the effectiveness of ETS policies has been widely acknowledged, it is unclear whether the policy effects depend on regional characteristics. To address this research gap, this study integrated the propensity score matching method and multi-period difference-in-difference model (PSM-DID) to examine the impacts of ETS on industrial output and pollution emissions, and the influence of city heterogeneity on policy effects. The results showed that the ETS positively affected industrial output and negatively affected pollutant emissions in the pilot cities. Furthermore, implementation of the ETS was more conducive to increasing industrial output while reducing emissions in cities with larger populations, higher financial development levels, and worse air quality. Nevertheless, in lower industrialized cities, the ETS implementation was more prominent in promoting industrial output. In this case, the environmental effect was lower than that in cities with higher industrialized. The findings provide a better understanding of city heterogeneity of ETS policy effects.
•Population, financial and pollution level influences positively emission trading scheme effects.•Chinese emission trading scheme produce better economic benefits in less industrialized cities.•The Propensity Score Matching method and multi-periods Difference-in-Difference model were used.
The paper examines ministerial reporting of Kenya's regional development authorities (RDAs) for the years 2011-14. Using a paradigm of accountable governance and central-local relations in a ...financial reporting context, textual analysis is deployed to ascertain what financial reporting challenges are faced by the Ministry of Regional Development Authorities (MORDA) in providing an account of the activities of Kenya's RDAs. Over this period, the MORDA received qualified or adverse opinions from the Office of the Auditor General of Kenya because of lack of internal controls and documentation supporting ministry financial statements. The results of the study suggest that the MORDA faces considerable challenges in meeting the expectations of indigenous-based vertical accountability. Suggested alternative indigenous mechanisms for improved reporting are presented by the study in terms of the MORDA-RDAs relationship.
Human capital and regional development Gennaioli, Nicola; La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2013, Letnik:
128, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1,569 subnational regions from 110 countries covering 74% of the world’s surface and 97% of its GDP. We ...combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital determinants of regional development with an examination of productivity in several thousand establishments located in these regions. To organize the discussion, we present a new model of regional development that introduces into a standard migration framework elements of both the Lucas (1978) model of the allocation of talent between entrepreneurship and work, and the Lucas (1988) model of human capital externalities. The evidence points to the paramount importance of human capital in accounting for regional differences in development, but also suggests from model estimation and calibration that entrepreneurial inputs and possibly human capital externalities help understand the data.
Logistics centers are home to many and varied facilities, such as storage, transportation of goods, handling, reassembling, clearing, disassembling, quality control, social services and providing ...accommodation, so on. Providing logistical activities from one location can provide some macro advantages, as well as regional development in developing countries. For the micro level, logistics center selection has an effective role in increasing the operational efficiency and decreasing the costs of the firms. While the wrong location selection for logistics center affects the operations and costs of the companies negatively, the optimal location selection increases the performance, competitiveness, profitability of the firms and reduces the costs of the firms. Since many different qualitative and quantitative criteria are considered in the selection of the logistics center, this selection problem is an MCDM problem. A new integrated MCDM model is proposed to solve this problem for Sivas province in Turkey. This study presents two contributions to the literature. Firstly, the number of studies related to CoCoSo method is limited in the literature, therefore, the CoCoSo method is proposed in this study. Secondly, a new integrated GIS-based MCDM model comprising fuzzy SWARA and CoCoSo is introduced to literature to address the location selection problem for a logistics center. In this study, the results of CoCoSo method and the resulfts of other MCDM methods (COPRAS, VIKOR, ARAS, MOORA, and MABAC) are compared to test the accuracy of results obtained by CoCoSo. Besides, the criteria weights are changed and the possible changes in the results are tracked.
•We analyze the spatial pattern of the effect of land-centered urbanization on rural development.•Land-centered urbanization has significantly promoted the development of agriculture and rural areas ...nationwide.•The effects of population, economic and land urbanization on rural development have a remarkable spatial difference.
Since the late 1970s, China has undergone an unprecedented urbanization process. With land finance as the main driving force, land-centered urbanization has not only greatly accelerated China’s economic and social development, but it has also had negative effects on social development and the environment. Amid the concerns regarding China's land-centered urbanization process, there have been growing calls for greater attention to be focused on the decline of rural China. The urban-rural relationship is the most basic social and economic relationship, a topic which has become a hotspot in geography, economics and sociology studies in recent decades. Based on panel data from 298 cities in China, from the 2001–2013 period, this paper uses the extended Cobb-Douglas model to measure the effect of land-centered urbanization on rural development, and its spatial pattern characteristics. The results show that, during the period from 2001 to 2013, China's urbanization level increased steadily, while the level of rural development showed a trend of declining first and then rising. Moreover, land-centered urbanization significantly promoted the development of rural areas nationwide, and urbanization’s influence intensity displayed strong regional and particularity characteristics. Generally, compared with the relatively poor areas in the central and western regions, urbanization in the economically developed areas has a stronger driving effect on rural development. The findings have an important reference value for policy-makers in new-type urbanization and rural revitalization strategies for China.
Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service ...delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing metropolitanisation. The case of Mangaung, an early instance of secondary city metropolitanisation, is an opportunity to examine the motivations underlying these reforms, the politics involved and their impacts on urban governance. Mangaung’s political and administrative leadership pursued metropolitanisation to jump scale, attain greater political autonomy vis-à-vis other tiers of government, and obtain fiscal and technical resources available only to metropolitan municipalities in South Africa’s urban municipal hierarchy. Metropolitanisation was no panacea for Mangaung’s governance challenges, however, since it did not resolve the underlying weaknesses in municipal capacity or the regional economy, nor did it address the spatial legacies of apartheid that produced a sprawling metropolitan service area. As other South African secondary cities contemplate metropolitanisation, we recommend revising municipal structures and mandates and strengthening administrative capacities and economies in secondary cities.
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