Search

Policymakers across the Southern U.S. have directed considerable attention to regional economic development plans, with mixed results. Questions remain over what types of industries, firms, and/or policies can drive long-range growth. Over the past two decades, researchers have started to focus on high-growth firms (HGFs) due to their potential innovation spillovers and job creation prospects, both of which drive further economic development. Employing databases from the Inc. 500, this study explores the dynamics of HGFs within Southern and comparative contexts. The first goal of this paper is to explore Southern HGF activity in comparison with the U.S. at-large. The second is to examine the geographical characteristics of HGFs within the South, which will include an exploration of locations, industrial mix, and the factors that could encourage HGF development and agglomeration. This paper will also analyze the longer-term ownership and acquisition patterns of HGFs across the South. Are such firms remaining embedded in the South or moving elsewhere through mergers or acquisitions? The paper concludes with a discussion of the impacts of HGFs on regional economic development and moreover, whether existing policies are conducive to these firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1957 and 1990, nearly 100 nuclear reactors were constructed throughout the U.S., and nuclear power currently accounts for 20 percent of electricity production nationwide. Nuclear plants are often constructed in small communities for which they constitute a large source of employment and income. To date, 24 nuclear reactors have undergone decommissioning, and more are expected in the future, particularly as nuclear reactors age and face increasingly strict regulations. This paper examines the effects of nuclear decommissioning over time at the county-level on measures of employment, income, and population using difference-in-differences regression and propensity score matching. Panel data are obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, and cover the years 1975-2014. The analysis finds that nuclear decommissioning is associated with positive and statistically significant increases in employment and per capita income over time. Results suggest that nuclear decommissioning may actually be a positive force in regional economic development, and concludes with limitations of the approach and implications for future research. As an emerging area of research, this paper is meant to build on previous work, as well as to provide a basis for further discussion and debate on the economic future of nuclear host communities and regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last year, a central issue in regional economic growth debate has been represented by the empirical analysis of Verdoorn's law related to the long-term dynamic relationship between the rate of growth in output and the productivity growth due to increasing returns. Several papers have tested Verdoorn's law on European countries as well as many other world economies. Recently, attempts have been made to provide foundations for a spatial version of the original law specification. The main contributions were dedicated to the inclusion of spatial dependence in the economic model. Surprisingly, in the literature on Verdoom's law the analysis of the spatial heterogeneity is not often considered. The aim of this paper is the regional analysis of the spatial dependence and heterogeneity in Verdoorn's law, identifying spatial regimes that can be interpreted as clusters of productivity growth in European regions at NUTS 2 level. To pursue this objective, an optimization algorithm for the identification of groups is used. This constitutes a modified version of Simulated Annealing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using data on 48 contiguous U.S. states and a spatial econometric approach, this paper examines short‐ and long‐run effects of productive higher education and highway infrastructure spending financed by different revenue sources on state economic growth. Following the Lagrange Multiplier, Wald, and Likelihood Ratio tests, the data are found to be characterized by both spatial lag and spatial error processes, leading to the estimation of a dynamic spatial Durbin model. By decomposing results of the dynamic spatial Durbin model into short‐ and long‐run direct as well as indirect (spillover) effects, we show that accounting for spillover effects provides a more comprehensive approach to uncovering the effects of productive government spending on growth. We find that, regardless of the financing source, productive higher education and highway spending have statistically significant short‐ and long‐run direct as well as spillover effects on state income growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite economic growth since the recession, the gap between the richest and the poorest segments of the population remains one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary America. This paper uses IR-95/20, IR-80/20, and IR-65/35 ratios to measure the income divides between the richest and the poorest segments in the mid-to-large-sized metropolises of the U.S. Southeast, their variation across ethnicities, and their association with metropolitan level attributes such as diversity, segregation, socio-economic, and other built-environment, and labor characteristics. The income divide ratios serve as the dependent variables whereas principal components along with state-dummy variables serve as the explanatory variables in regressions analyses. The metropolises that are large, diverse, and better educated are the most income-divided whereas those with lower educated people are less divided. Metropolises with larger shares of their labor engaged in primary sectors of economy have higher income divides; this observation also holds true for African Americans and Hispanics. Metropolises that gained in intermixing during 2000-2014 are associated with a lower income divide and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the companion paper in this issue, this essay analyses five case studies that can be taken as prototypes of the system-wide cultural district culture-led developmental model. The research targets five cities in Europe and the U.S.: Valencia, Austin, Newcastle/ Gateshead, Linz, and Denver. Each presents specific characteristics but also some deep, structural common traits. The case studies are compared and their future viability is evaluated in terms of the factors presented in the companion piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largest corporations in the world are increasingly adopting international corporate responsibility ( CR) reporting standards from organizations such as the Global Reporting Initiative to meet stakeholder expectations for reliable and comparable social and environmental performance data. At the same time, significant geographic variations in reporting rates remain. The goal of this paper is to explain the diffusion of international CR reporting standards within the Americas. Reporting rates cannot be explained fully by a country's population size or level of economic development. Based on a unique statistical analysis of the relative impact of institutional environments, corporate resources and strategic orientation, stakeholder pressures, and transnational trade and learning networks, this research concludes that the diffusion of CR reporting throughout the Americas to date has been fueled by a rather narrow set of corporations with the capacities necessary to implement CR reporting and the strategic orientation to benefit from it. Moreover, corporations' internal capacities and the external demands for CR reporting have been enhanced in select countries by national and transnational CR advocacy and training organizations. This has led to an uneven development of CR reporting thus far, and this unevenness is expected to continue even as overall reporting rates increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a critical assessment of recent economic development policy directions centered on the concept of regional innovation clusters. We begin by investigating the rationale underlying the Obama administration's promotion of regional innovation clusters (RICs) and their introduction to the policy arena in its Strategy for American Innovation. The connections among RICs and existing research and policies in industry and occupational clusters, regional innovation systems and regional economic development are identified and analyzed to highlight those most critical challenges to conceptualizing and theorizing RICs. While we applaud the long overdue focus of economic development policies on sub-national regions, we identify several major conceptual shortcomings and programmatic difficulties associated with RICs as a centerpiece for economic development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeting industry clusters for economic development has become popular despite the lack of empirical evidence about the spatial scales over which various clusters agglomerate. This paper identifies twenty manufacturing industry clusters from a principal components analysis of interindustry patterns of trade and measures the spatial employment concentration of each cluster's plants within a polycentric framework. Two to eight centers of employment concentration are detected within the Southern California region for each set of trade linkages. Our spatial half-life measure reveals that half of a cluster's employment in associated establishments is located within a typical range of eight to twelve kilometers (about 5–7.5 miles) to the nearest employment center or subcenter for the particular cluster. Furthermore, employment in seventeen of the twenty clusters is found to be more spatially concentrated than manufacturing employment as a whole, suggesting that geographic proximity is important to interindustry linkages in the Southern California economy. More important, the spatial concentration across industry clusters varies considerably within the metropolitan area, implying that economic development practitioners should consider local context and adapt industry cluster theories to the specific advantages and disadvantages of their immediate locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Announces developments concerning economic development and social change in the United States as of January 1984. Inclusion of the American Association of Housing Educators' call for papers for its 1984 annual meeting to be held in Washington D.C.; Articles in the summer 1983 issue of the 'Journal of the American Planning Association.'