Search

The work discussed in Bivand and Brunstad (2003 ) was an attempt to throw light on apparent variability in regional convergence in relation to agriculture as a sector subject to powerful political measures, in Western Europe, 1989–1999. The present study takes up a number of points made in conclusion in that paper. Since it is possible that the non-stationarity found there is related to further missing variables, including the inadequacy of the way in which agricultural subsidies are represented, we attempt to replace the agriculture variables with better estimates of producer subsidy equivalents. It is also sensible to check that agricultural support is not masking or masked by other variables, for example human capital. The article is also an account of the development of software contributed to the project ( Development Core Team, 2005 ) as packages, in particular the spdep package for spatial econometrics. New functions generously contributed by researchers will be presented and compared. We find that agricultural support does impact regional economic growth after human capital is taken into consideration, and that we can show that apparent non-stationarity is alleviated by adding these variables.We further find that the moderated remaining spatial autocorrelation can best be represented by a substantive spatial lag model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the determinants of regional economic growth in the European Union adopting a non-parametric approach. Although the local-linear kernel estimator applied does not explicitly take into account the spatial dimension of the data, it is found to be consistent in our context. In addition, the geographically weighted regression turns out to be less efficient. We obtain evidence of a non-linear relationship between regional growth and its determinants in the form of parameter heterogeneity and threshold effects. These non-linearities mainly affect the initial productivity of labour, the human capital endowment and, as a novelty, the level of infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study is to examine the effects of investment in human capital, as funded by EU cohesion policy, on economic development in Poland at the local (LAU 2) level, that is, at the level of municipalities. We found evidence that human capital investment has a positive effect on local revenues. This effect is stronger than what is observed for the assistance programmes not related to human capital. The impact of intervention on migration balance is in turn not significant. We also observed that the effectiveness of the assistance within the cohesion policy depends on existing regional preconditions for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional policy-makers have long sought to attract highly-educated workers with a view to stimulating economic growth and vibrancy. Previous studies over the decades leading up to the new millennium show human capital divergence across cities, where the share of college graduates grew faster in cities that had larger initial shares of college-educated workers. However, labour markets have changed significantly post-2000, likely affecting migration decisions of highly-skilled workers. Additionally, past studies have not controlled for important changes in industry education levels and overall industry composition that may influence city-level college graduate growth. We use detailed 4-digit NAICS industry employment data combined with public micro-data to construct measures of industry skill upgrading and changes in industry composition to control for their effects on human capital growth. We find agglomeration forces, rather than initial graduate share, explains college-graduate share growth post-2000. We also decompose graduates into bachelors and postgraduate degree holders to determine whether different forces are at play on growth of graduates at different education levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chain internationalization is promoting a new cascade of agglomeration and dispersion. Headquarter tasks agglomerate in major cities in developed countries, whereas labour-intensive tasks are shed to developing countries where off-shored tasks are geographical concentrated. The entire international supply chain is productivity and welfare-enhancing, raising the efficiency of human resource use. An international supply chain can also be a route for inclusive globalization. Such benefits are offset by potential risk of volatility deriving from idiosyncratic supply shocks triggered by powerful natural disasters and other reasons and from final demand shocks. This case study of East Asia illustrates these points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examined the relationship between the medium and small enterprise (SME) sector and the economic growth in Brazil. The researchers investigated the significance of the size of the SME sector by the share of the level of human capital and SME employment measured by the mean years of schooling in the enterprises. They also assessed how employment and human capital influence the growth of the sector in the micro-regions of the country.

The productivity of knowledge workers (the “ H people”) relative to that of unskilled workers (the “ L people”) could warrant that a region formulate economic development policies in order to raise this ratio via the in-migration of skilled labour. This article presents a theoretical model which demonstrates the conditions that must be satisfied before an amenity based programme for economic development can succeed. The ratio of H to L turns out to play a crucial role as does the assumption that H’s are L averse. We also examine the possibility that an adverse amenity shock can push a region into an “ L trap”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]