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By reducing the cost of performing isolated economic activities in remote areas, information technology might serve as a substitute for urban agglomeration. The paper assesses this hypothesis using data on Italian households' usage of the Internet, e-commerce, and e-banking. The results do not support the argument that the Internet reduces the role of distance. Internet usage is much more frequent among urban consumers than among their non-urban counterparts. The use of e-commerce is basically unaffected by the size of the city where the household lives. Geographically remote consumers are discouraged from purchasing goods by the fact that they cannot inspect them beforehand. Leisure activities and cultural items (i.e., books, CDs, and tickets for museums and theaters) are the only goods and services for which e-commerce is used more in isolated areas. Finally, e-banking bears no relationship to city size. In choosing a bank, non-urban customers give more importance to personal acquaintance than do urban clients, partly because bank account holders in remote areas are more likely to have taken out a loan from their bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Producer services have been among the most rapidly growing industries, as measured by employment, in the United States and in Europe in recent decades. The production and delivery of these specialized forms of service industry work require the use of transportation and communications systems in a variety of ways, including the physical movement of people working in these industries, as well as the movement of the information related to the production and distribution of their work. Some of this work is performed in localized markets, requiring travel between clients and suppliers in local transportation modes, such as auto, bus, or other types of transportation. Other work is done by specialists who travel interregionally and globally to do their work, primarily traveling to their clients. There is little knowledge of how these production relationships have changed with the advent of the Internet and the widespread use of e-mail in the business production process. Within the framework of this STELLA initiative, this paper outlines research needs in this area, and frames an approach that would produce badly needed knowledge about impacts on the producer services of the Internet and related e-commerce initiatives on physical transportation systems at a local to interregional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vigorous development of rural E‐commerce reveals a powerful pattern of economic clustering. Recently, many Taobao Villages have formed in more than 80% of the provinces in rural China, and increasingly households are using E‐commerce for entrepreneurial innovation in Taobao Villages. However, the effect and mechanism of the Taobao Village model on households' entrepreneurship behavior remain unclear. Using survey data and structural equation modeling, we analyzed the factors of households' entrepreneurship behavior and investigated the mechanism of rural E‐commerce clustering on the households' entrepreneurship behavior in Taobao Villages. The results show that: (1) rural E‐commerce clusters stimulated entrepreneurial enthusiasm and increased entrepreneurial behavior; (2) local resource endowment, entrepreneurial atmosphere and culture, threshold for entrepreneurship, and demonstrative leadership had significant positive effects on households' entrepreneurship behavior; (3) external environmental support, including government, and external business environment support had significant positive effects on E‐commerce development. All these results indicate that rural E‐commerce clusters promote households' entrepreneurship behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores possible ways in which growth in Internet retailing (e-retailing) may affect the spatial distribution of economic activities. After a brief overview of e-retailing, a categorization of possible spatial impacts is introduced. These include impacts on the retail industry, such as substitution of e-retail for brick-and-mortar retail, impacts on transportation, such as substitution of freight transportation for personal transportation in goods delivery, and pervasive impacts that affect the whole economy. The latter category includes uniform delivered pricing, spatial leveling of accessibility, and marketing strategies that target individuals rather than regions. The question of whether e-retailing and brick-and-mortar retailing are truly substitutes is taken up in the next section, along with potential implications of multi-channel retailing. The final section of the paper defines some critical research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]