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An effective and accurate poverty-alleviation system is necessary for eradicating poverty and promoting regional economic and social growth. Performance evaluation plays a key role in developing a precise poverty-alleviation policy. However, systematic performance evaluation of precise poverty-alleviation efforts has been largely ignored in the literature. This study sorts the poverty-alleviation performance of 10 major urban areas in Shaanxi Province using the count and analysis method. The empirical findings show that among poverty indexes, the yield of agricultural products has the greatest impact on poverty alleviation. Furthermore, the poverty-alleviation performance of Xianyang, Weinan, and Ankang is relatively high. The efforts of Xi'an and Baoji are at the middle level, and those of Tongchuan and Yan'an are at a relatively low level. This paper identifies the poverty alleviation performance status for each area at the indicator level and then offers a corresponding analysis and proposes countermeasures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary world, finance is crucial to economy and financial agglomeration has a lasting effect on the economic growth. The areas of financial agglomeration will influence the economy of the local parts throughout agglomeration effect, and have an impact on its spatially related parts. Based on Chinese inter-provincial panel data from 2007 to 2018, this study constructs an indicator system of financial agglomeration and measures provincial agglomeration levels to examine its impact on regional economic growth. The results show that, first, the level of financial agglomeration has a trend of steady change and presents a ladder-decreasing agglomeration pattern. Second, financial agglomeration could effectively promote the economic growth of local and spatially related regions. The development of the financial industry depended more on geographical distance, and the diffusion effect of financial agglomeration in the eastern, central, and western regions are in different stages. Finally, by summarizing the research conclusions, this study put forward some suggestions for China's regional economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary world, finance is crucial to economy and financial agglomeration has a lasting effect on the economic growth. The areas of financial agglomeration will influence the economy of the local parts throughout agglomeration effect, and have an impact on its spatially related parts. Based on Chinese inter-provincial panel data from 2007 to 2018, this study constructs an indicator system of financial agglomeration and measures provincial agglomeration levels to examine its impact on regional economic growth. The results show that, first, the level of financial agglomeration has a trend of steady change and presents a ladder-decreasing agglomeration pattern. Second, financial agglomeration could effectively promote the economic growth of local and spatially related regions. The development of the financial industry depended more on geographical distance, and the diffusion effect of financial agglomeration in the eastern, central, and western regions are in different stages. Finally, by summarizing the research conclusions, this study put forward some suggestions for China's regional economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined finance-growth nexus in the finance industry and the influencing factors of economic indicators which deliberate on the performance of the Solow Growth model to prove the actuality of financial development (FD) inside the economic growth (EG) model, based on the regional data from 1980 to 2017 in Africa. We applied the econometric method of GMM style panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) and panel quantile regression (PQR). With the optimal finance-growth outcome, the review shows that the economic indicators influence the finance-growth nexus. The quantile results show that high economic indicators help to strengthen the finance-growth nexus, whereas low economic indicators hinder it. The GMM style PVAR results present a mixed effect in terms of the connection and marginal significance, indicating that FD has a varied impact on economic growth. Last, the granger causality results show a two-way causal association amid finance-growth in Western, Central, Eastern, and Southern African economies and a unidirectional causal link of finance-growth in Northern Africa. The policy conclusion is that to gain the long-term economic benefits of FD, African countries should strive for low and steady economic stability. To attain the required economic stability, it may be important to use suitable fiscal and monetary policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The severity of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and the spatial heterogeneity of its impact have accelerated the study of regional economic resilience. However, few have investigated whether pre-crisis determinants impact regional economic resilience. This study explores the factors influencing regional economic resilience across 284 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2019. We use data from the National Bureau of Statistics in China and apply a multilevel logistic regression model. The results indicate the magnitude of the province effects on regional performance during the financial crisis. The results show that regional economic resilience is significantly shaped by provincial trajectories and region size. Furthermore, economic agglomeration, manufacturing, education, infrastructure, and financial development make regions less susceptible to external shocks and more resilient to financial crises. The results provide supportive evidence for governments to adopt region-based policies and thereby improve their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using regional data encompassing 155 Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions across the EU-28 member states, we estimate the effect of tourist arrivals (total, domestic, and foreign) on regional growth over 2000-2018. Our empirical strategy tackles three data properties that cripple common econometric approaches: cross-section dependence, nonstationarity, and the endogeneity of the regressors. In addition to "pooled" models that assume common parameters across regions, we run "heterogeneous" models where parameters are allowed to differ between regions. Results of the pooled estimations show that domestic and total tourism inflows have positively and significantly contributed to growth, and the positive effect of foreign tourism is statistically discernible in regions that are mainly destinations for foreign tourists. Findings based on region-specific regressions reveal that the average impact on regional growth of tourist inflows is positive and significant, and large regional disparities in terms of the growth impact of domestic/foreign tourism exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a regional dynamic macroeconomic model with an eclectic, broadly Keynesian and behavioural flavour. The model, which is parameterized on Scottish data, is used to identify the impact of expectations and business confidence on regional resilience. Simulations compare the evolution of the regional economy after a temporary negative export shock under a range of investment functions. The mainstream perfect foresight formulation generates a reduction in activity, which is small and is limited to the duration of the shock. The heuristic-based, imperfect-information investment models produce more negative, longer-lasting and unstable adjustment paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation and scope expansion of regional organizations (ROs) is one of the most prominent features in contemporary international politics. In particular, many regional economic organizations (REOs) have expanded into the security realm. This trend has often resulted in an overlap with regional security organizations (RSOs) already in place. This study sheds light on this phenomenon by identifying the conditions under which REOs trespass into the security policy domain despite the fact that preexisting RSOs already fulfill security functions. We argue that the presence of strategic rivalries is an important driver of the creation and depth of organizational overlap through scope expansion. Specifically, RSOs that include significant interstate rivalries propel a subgroup of like-minded states to advance and deepen security cooperation through their existing REOs. Using an original data set of security cooperation within economic and security ROs and a quantitative analysis, we find substantial support for this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate the causal relationships between international tourism growth and regional economic expansion in China, and more importantly, disclose the factors determining the occurrence of these relationships. The empirical results reveal that 10 of 29 regions experienced tourism-led growth (TLG) during 1978 to 2013, whereas nine regions experienced economy-driven tourism growth (EDTG). Different from the past literature, this study uses Bayesian probit models to unveil the factors influencing these different growth patterns. Our results suggest that regions with less-developed economies, larger economic sizes, and covering larger geographic areas are more likely to experience TLG, and regions with less-developed economies are more likely to experience EDTG as well. Lastly, practical implications are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much scholarly attention has been paid to ways in which metropolitan areas are politically structured and operated to achieve a dual goal, economic growth, and equality, relatively less is known about the complex relationship between metropolitan governance structures and growth–inequality dynamics. This study investigates how and to what extent metropolitan governance structures shape regional economic growth and inequality trajectories using data for 267 US metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2010. Findings from a two-stage least squares regression analysis suggest that economic growth is associated with governance structures in a nonlinear fashion, with relatively more rapid growth rates in both highly centralized and decentralized metropolitan areas. However, these regions are also found to experience a larger increase in income inequality, indicating an important trade-off to be considered carefully in exploring ways to reform existing governance settings. These findings further suggest that the so-called growth–inequality trade-off may exist not only in their direct interactions but through their connections via governance or other variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluate the impact of a half century of nontransportation Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) investments on its constituent counties using quasi-experimental methods. We apply a set of propensity score methods and select the most appropriate matching algorithm for use in identifying the effects of policy implementation. The results of the analyses indicate that counties that received ARC funding grew faster than the control counties. The long-run per capita income growth rate in ARC investment counties was an average of 5.5 percent higher than in the control counties. Employment also grew significantly faster in these ARC counties than in the control counties for most of the study period. The average difference in the long-run employment growth rates between the counties that received ARC investments and those counties that did not was approximately 4.2 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study computes the Discomfort Index, also known as the Misery Index, for 276 European Union NUTS2 regions to determine how “suffering” a region is or not before and after the global crisis. The geographical distribution of European Union regions according to their discomfort has deeply changed in the post-financial crisis years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth convergence, one of the classical assumption in regional economic growth, has been perplexing. There are many empirical studies trying to test if there is regional convergence in China. In this article, we bring new information of the finer spatial scale to the existing literature by using neoclassical convergence analysis, cross-sectional specifications, panel data models, and spatial econometric techniques to test the convergence hypothesis across 2,286 cities and counties in China. Empirical findings from cross-sectional data and spatial panel data show that significant absolute β and conditional β convergence are present in gross domestic product per capita after controlling for investment return rate, human capital, savings rate, population growth, technology advancement, capital depreciation rate, and initial technology level. We also find spatial agglomeration in urban and county economic growth is strong, and spatial effects are significant. Urban and county economic growth convergence rates for 1992–2010 show a gradually accelerated development trend. We present significant evidence that levels of investment, human capital, and initial technology impose significant facilitating effects on city and county economic growth, while savings and population growth have significant negative effects. And city and county economic growth differ in terms of convergence levels and influential factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of the I International Regional Science Review i brings together a collection of articles presented at the Seventh International Workshop on Regional, Urban, and Spatial Economics (RUSE) in China held in Changsha, China, in the summer of 2018. Finally, China is grappling with growing income inequality as China manages its transition from central planning to more market mechanisms. The publication of this special issue reflects the continued commitment to regional, urban, and spatial economics in the I International Regional Science Review i . [Extracted from the article]

This study analyses the gaps in financial centres' competitiveness and their impact on regional economic convergence in 23 European Union Member States during the period of the Global Financial Crisis. In particular, we explore the economic convergence and divergence patterns among regions from two different perspectives across the selected European Union Member States and within each country. From a methodological viewpoint, we apply a fully non-parametric framework to the club convergence model and address the endogeneity problem between financial centres' competitiveness and regional economic convergence. Our results show that the large and internationally-oriented financial centres experienced a diverging trend in terms of the competitiveness of financial centres' business environment during the peak of the crisis. We also find evidence that the convergence of financial centres reduces regional economic inequalities between the regions where financial centres are located. In contrast, the increase in the competitiveness of financial centres only serves to widen existing inequalities at the national level. Finally, we examine and discuss the impact of competitiveness drivers of financial centres on the convergence pattern of European Union regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, increased attention has been given to role of inter-organisational knowledge networks in promoting regional economic growth. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence base concerning the extent to which inter-organisational knowledge networks influence regional growth is at best patchy. This article utilises a panel data regression approach to undertake an empirical analysis of economic growth across regions of the UK. Drawing on the concept of network capital, significant differences in the stocks of network capital and flows of knowledge within and across regions are found, which are significantly associated with regional rates of economic growth. The analysis finds that both inter and intra-regional networks shape regional growth processes, highlighting the role of both embedded localised linkages and the importance of accessing more geographically distant knowledge. The study adds weight to the suggestion that one of the most interesting implications of endogenous growth theory relates to the impact of the spatial organisation of regions on flows of knowledge. It is concluded that the adoption of a relational approach to understanding differing economic geographies indicates that network systems are a key component of the regional development mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on South African post-apartheid foreign policy have evolved through four distinctive strands: the estimative, the new dispensation, the ambiguity and strategic engagement. In this article, I attempt to illustrate that a burgeoning thread is noticeable in recent times within the fourth strand offering a marked perspective on the ideational and utilitarian substance of soft power for South Africa’s foreign policy and within the discursive context of its regional/middle power status. In considering the varied arguments submitted by scholars in this regard, the article uncovers three significant thematic positions. First, the cultivation and utilisation of soft power instruments present multiple platforms for expanding South Africa’s global reputation and regional influence. Second, soft power has been the fulcrum of South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy. Third and definitely no less important, this new body of analysis offer critical explanation into the international moral authority and global acceptance that South Africa ostensibly enjoys over and above other regional competitors. Drawing on Alden and Schoeman’s ‘symbolic representivity’ narrative, I argue that it is on the basis of these three interrelated assertions that South Africa’s putative hegemonic reference thrives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two decades have seen African countries adopt a new security approach through the activities of regional economic communities (RECs) and the African Union’s (AU) African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). This article argues that despite progress in conflict prevention and the promotion of peace, defence and security through the APSA and RECs, challenges do remain. In particular, factors such as financial costs involved, the inadequate funds available for peace and security missions, conflicting interests and lack of agreement, poor co- ordination and inadequate human and logistics capacity have constrained the ability of African countries to achieve their peace and security agenda. Thus, for peace and security efforts being undertaken by the AU and RECs to be effective, the actors involved should have not only the requisite capacity but also political will and commitment, and cooperation among members and with the international community should remain crucial to the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ‘financialisation’ has now entered the lexicon of academics and policy makers, though there is still no agreement on its meaning and significance. One of the earlier definitions was in relation to the growing weight of financial motives, financial actors and markets in the operation of modern economies, both at the national and international level, from the early 1980s until today. Building on this definition, this paper sheds further light on the implications of spatial financialisation, which has been associated with the over and under-extension of credit across and within countries and evolving financial instability. The paper’s primary contribution is to extend in a robust manner a powerful panel data convergence testing methodology to analyse the spatial scale and temporal evolution of Italian regional lending conditions. The paper concludes that financial divergence has broadly increased in Italian regions. Furthermore, we are able to link regional financialisation to the growing north–south divide in a significant and meaningful way. As a result, the ability of southern regions in Italy to absorb adverse macroeconomic and financial shocks has been weakened. Relevant regional financial policies have thereby become very important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between migration and transportation improvements. More precisely, will transportation improvements between central business districts (CBDs) and rural areas make migration trends more favorable in rural areas? Due to household utility geographical differentials, there are interregional migration. Thus, it is resaonable to believe that transportation improvements that increase the access of rural population to the labor and the service market of CBDs will influence interregional migration in rural areas positively. I will examine whether this is true for Iceland, a thinly populated area with two CBDs. A macro panel data set from Iceland will be used. It represents several essential varaibles of the house market for seventy-nine municipalities in Iceland during the period from 1986 to 2006. Furthermore, I will investigate whether there are any gender aspects regarding the matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine the effects of the aging population in Illinois with inclusion of the household’s heterogeneity across migration status and investment in human capital. By adopting a stylized Mincer wage regression, the article shows that there are significant gaps in returns to education between migration statuses in Illinois; further, there exist significant relationships between a resident’s demographics and the probability of in- and out-migration to/from Illinois. Using a two-sector Overlapping Generations (OLG) model incorporated with the household’s heterogeneity over migration status, this article projects the economic growth of Illinois in the future. This article also shows that the effects of the government’s immigration policy that aims at replacing low-productive international immigrants with native and relatively high-productive unemployed individuals who have been unemployed, are very limited in terms of per capita income, welfare, and aggregate productivity. On the contrary, a tax and transfer policy inducing international immigrants to invest more in their education works relatively better under the demographic changes facing Illinois over the next three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, China scholars have often debated the meaning and definition of the Chinese Revolution. While some studies reveal discontinuity or radical and transformative change, others show continuity or gradual and evolutionary change. This article contributes to the debate by examining how the connective tissues in Guizhou’s regional economic institutions—the regional economic bureaucracy and regional state enterprises as well as enterprise organization, management, and incentive structures and mechanisms—emerged, grew, broke down, and were replaced over the period 1937 to 1957. Specifically, it focuses on the creation and expansion of Guizhou’s regional state enterprises, the transformation of enterprise authority structure, the transplantation of the Soviet economic accounting system, the appropriation of the Western accounting system, and the development of social service and welfare institutions. Drawing extensively on heretofore unavailable archival and published material, this study demonstrates that the changes in Guizhou’s regional economic institutions were both radical and transformative and gradual and evolutionary. In the process, Guizhou’s regional state enterprises came to be defined by bureaucratic enterprise governance, Chinese Communist Party control over enterprise employees, and distinctive enterprise management and incentive mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to show how the techniques of regional science and peace science can be applied for the economic development of poor countries. This article also describes techniques for integrating regional science and peace science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, state-endorsed planning policies of restriction and demolition have had a profound oppressive effect on Palestinian urban development and political activity in the city. While the effects of this oppression have been widely discussed, this paper offers a closer look at 'groundlevel' planning processes. The analysis of independent local zoning plans submitted by Palestinians to legalize and expand their houses reveals a wider range of activity, negotiations, and inconsistencies. I argue that the practice of the independent plans, as small-scale yet unmediated acts operating from within the institutional planning system, presents a form of encroachment on the bureaucratic apparatus. While the 'spotzoning' amendment to the planning and building law originally resulted from pressures to promote free-market logic in urban planning practices, it unwittingly opened up the possibility for excluded and subordinated residents to pursue a new course of action. Thus, the concurrent tendencies of the Israeli planning system towards ethnonational goals, rational-comprehensive planning episteme, and the neoliberal logic have led to unexpected, at times contradictory, results. I claim that by dwelling on the inherent tensions between these tendencies, the independent plans work towards transforming the urban context into an arena for negotiating rights and positing demands that cannot be articulated in the political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is typically a strong correlation between air traffic and economic growth, the direction of causation between the two is not clear. To address the existence of causality in this paper we consider the nature of this relationship in different types of regions. The empirical analysis is based on European-level annual data from eighty-six regions and thirteen countries on air traffic and regional economic performance in the period 1991 to 2010. Granger noncausality analysis in a panel framework, which allows possible heterogeneity between regions, was used. The results suggest that the causality processes are homogenous from regional growth to air traffic. There is causality from air traffic to regional growth in peripheral regions, but this causality is less evident in core regions. Thus, air transportation plays a crucial role in boosting development in remote regions. There might, therefore, be a case for subsidizing local airports in these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One consequence of the economic downturn and pressure for public sector reform is a renewed focus upon private sector engagement (PSE) within subnational economic governance. Yet past attempts to promote PSE within urban and regional development policy and governance have been routinely characterised by the partial and uneven involvement of business interests. Adopting a strategic-relational approach, and building upon insights from the developing literature on business-society relations, this paper critically examines how PSE unfolded in a specifi c spatial and temporal context, through empirical investigation of the evolution of the City Growth Strategy as realised within two areas in London. This analysis explores the diff erence between policy script and business performance and identifi es key dimensions of material self-interest, nonmarketbased rationales, and divergent private/public discourses as critical to the selective nature of emergent PSE strategies and tactics. Critically, these issues remain largely unaddressed within current moves to put in place a private sector led subnational agenda, with clear consequences for understanding its likely impact across diff erentially constituted urban and regional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our focus is the effect of public spending to promote tourism on tourism growth and broader economic growth among U.S. states. We estimate a series of regression models using a panel of state-level data for the years 1985 through 2003 to identify the effect of public tourism promotion spending (TPS) on state tourism growth, gross state product growth, and state employment growth, when such spending is financed through own-source revenues. Results indicate that the effect of higher TPS on tourism or employment growth depends on the existing level of tourism expenditures in the state. More specifically, results indicate that additional TPS increases tourism and employment growth for states that have low levels of initial tourism expenditures. However, that effect diminishes as initial levels of tourism expenditures increase. For states with very high initial levels of tourism expenditures, employment can decline following increased TPS funded through own-source revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

This paper examines the effect of class conflict on industrial location both theoretically and empirically. It demonstrates that there is a sound theoretical basis and empirical support for the conclusion that U.S. industries have chosen to abandon agglomeration and scale economies in order to secure a distribution of income that favors capital at the expense of labor. The decline of the U.S. manufacturing belt is examined with reference to union density, bargaining power, and the effects that large-scale production plants have on these factors. The meat packing industry in the postwar United States serves as a case study to establish the specific ways that class conflict has shaped the scale profile and geographic distribution of production plants. The paper builds upon the class conflict approach to urban and regional economics pioneered by Matthew Edel and David Gordon and aims to demonstrate its explanatory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the utility of investigating regional economic policy (REP) as constituted through the interplay of imaginaries, political projects, and institutional arrangements. It frames REP in process terms-as continually 'in-the-making' and emerging out of the intersecting trajectories of ideas, policy, individuals, and other resources. The empirical focus is economic governance in Auckland, New Zealand, in the years following the widely publicised neoliberal reforms and profound economic restructuring of the l980s and early l990s. The analysis draws on the authors' particular positionality of being involved in knowledge production, both in academic and in policy arenas, and benefits from the development of a range of poststructural political economy methodologies by Auckland-based researchers. The concept of 'political project' is argued to be a useful analytical tool for linking circulating academic imaginaries, political initiatives, and particular policy rationales. By means of juxtaposing key aspects of particular economic imaginaries with political! policy initiatives and developments, it is shown that knowledge production for subnational economic governance is coconstitutive, contradictory, occurs on multiple geographical scales, and is mediated and remediated by place-specific and time-specific institutional actors. The methodological strategy of highlighting associations with the potential for interaction, rather than seeking causal processes, not only reveals the politicised nature of contextual facets of contemporary interventions, but promises to make a richer base for exploring possibilities for acting differently in urban and regional policy worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts on planning-related topics including the history of electrification in the U.S., civilian perspectives on death and eternity during the civil war and the analysis of masonry architecture.

This article analyzes the gender wage gap in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, region and possible explanations for the disparity in earnings between women and men. Today, women's labor force participation rates in Pittsburgh mirror national averages, but the gender wage gap in the region remains larger than the U.S. average. The article places women's role in the workforce in Pittsburgh in the context of the regional economy and its changes. The major changes in the role of women in the Pittsburgh regional economy occurred during a period of major economic restructuring of the regional economy beginning in the 1980s, lagging women nationally. Economic restructuring in an older industrial region, such as Pittsburgh, changed both where people worked and who worked. The research then compares possible explanations for the gender wage gap in Pittsburgh to the United States using the Oaxaca decomposition. The results find that in Pittsburgh, women are not as concentrated in low-paying occupations compared to the United States, but are much more likely to be working in low-paying industries compared to the United States. The authors find that the legacy of Pittsburgh's highly specialized industrial structure and its impacts on women's labor force participation rates still exert a force today as the regional economy continues its restructuring process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent worldwide trend towards devolution has been driven by the belief that fiscal decentralisation is likely to have a positive effect on government efficiency and economic growth. It is generally assumed that the transfer of powers and resources to lower tiers of government allows for a better matching of public policies to local needs and thus for a better allocation of resources. These factors, in turn, are expected to lead to an improvement in regional economic performance, if subnational authorities shift resources from current to capital expenditures in search of a better response to local needs. In this paper we test these assumptions empirically by analysing the evolution of subnational expenditure categories and regional growth in Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. We find that, contrary to expectations, decentralisation has coincided in the sample countries with a relative increase in current expenditures at the expense of capital expenditures, which has been associated with lower levels of economic growth in countries where devolution has been driven from above (India and Mexico), but not in Spain, where it has been driven from below. We hypothesise that the differences in legitimacy between the central or federal government and subnational governments in top-down and bottom-up processes of devolution may be at the origin of the diverse capacity to deliver greater allocative and productive efficiency and, eventually, greater economic growth by devolved governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of articles about planning including those focusing on settlement house work and social reform, the development of heating and cooking technology in the U.S. in the 19th century and emergence of historic sites as tourist destinations in the U.S. in the late 19th century.

Using Montreal as a case study, the authors investigate whether overlapping labor markets explain economic links between the suburbs and the central city. Despite interconnection between labor markets, they find only weak evidence of commuting ties between particular suburbs and the city center. However, economic functions—but also some services and amenities—are distributed unevenly across the metropolitan area. The authors suggest that other connections, such as those generated by occasional consumption activities, interfirm exchanges, and other weak ties could be explored to more fully understand the economic ties between constituent parts of metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on planning-related topics which include an examination of the popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s, an examination of how religious diversity in community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change and an examination of child labor in urban industries in the Dutch Republic.

Since the arrival of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the discourse of American military strategy has been framed around a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This article takes up the question of whether the RMA discourse represents a real strategic shift through an examination of the distribution of Defense Department spending on procurement across economic sectors and geographical space for the period 1990 to 2004. Detailed analysis of procurement data shows that the RMA builds on an earlier transformation in the United States' defense posture around the post-cold war disarmament rather than signal a new era for the military. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis seeks to better understand the geography of American poverty over time. Cluster analysis is used to group 34,908 minor civil divisions according to their similarity in mean-centered poverty rates from 1980 to 2000. Logistic regression is used to asses the groupings' statistical validity and accuracy. Results identify twelve statistically distinct groupings and that over three thousand subcounty places had poverty rates of nearly 20 percent above the national average going back to 1980. However, less than 50 percent of these fall within the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Persistent Poverty Counties. The new typology shows the diversity of poverty in terms and identifies places based on poverty's relative severity. The typology also uniquely identifies places that moved into and out of high poverty and identifies many poor places that are ''statistically invisible'' using existing typologies. Results show that correlates of poverty identified in the literature generally hold true across smaller geographic scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on land use planning topics, including "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," "More Than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge" and "Methodology for the Survival Analysis of Urban Building Stocks."

A good deal of research within the cultural turn in economic geography has sought to understand the relationship between economic activity and regional culture. This work encompasses an increasingly heterodox set of approaches to regional economic activity, from innovation studies to processes of embedding to accounts of regional learning and clustering, and an increasingly broad set of empirical cases through which these issues are regularly discussed. Only recently has the literature had much to say about the relationship between scientific knowledge and regional culture, however, or about the empirical experience of non-Western regional economic activity and forms of innovation within this. This paper seeks to further develop these two recent strands by bringing them together. Firstly it transposes the study of high-technology regional cultures to a developing world and socialist country context. I examine, as a case study, Cuba's Science Pole, a biomedical growth pole on the outskirts of Havana comprising some forty-two interlinked institutions and 14000 scientists. I show how a space for biotechnology was created and maintained outside of the capitalist milieu with which the industry has come to be associated in the West. More specifically, I reveal how the formal demands made by the Cuban state of this biotechnology endeavour paradoxically encouraged the development of a suite of informal and innovative scientific practices. To account for how this very different approach nevertheless resulted in a similar 'regional culture' of innovation to that found in high-technology regions in the West, I suggest we need to consider not just the structural components of regional cultures (labour mobility, attitudes to risk, etc) but also the forms of rationality that underpin such factors themselves. In order to do this I turn to some of the insights of the science-studies literature as to the epistemological foundations of processes of innovation and knowledge production, to argue that regional cultures of innovation are never just economic spaces, they arc also epistemic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of papers on city planning published from 2007 to 2008, including "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Inter-war Harlem," by Clare Corbould, "(Re)making the Other, Heterosexualising Everyday Space," by Kath Browne, and "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder.

The main purpose of the study in this paper is to establish to what extent accessibility to R&D and university-educated labor can explain regional export performance. This is done by estimating knowledge production functions, with total export value and number of high-valued exports in Swedish municipalities from 1997 to 1999 as outputs. The results in the paper indicate that accessibility to university-educated labor has the greatest positive effects. The value of exported products is mainly affected by local accessibility to university-educated labor (and company R&D). The intra- and inter-regional accessibilities play a more important role when the number of high-valued export products in Swedish municipalities is the output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on planning which include "Labor Unions and Affordable Housing: An Uneasy Relationship," "Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of Disguises in Inter-War England," and "Urbanization and Spatial Organization: Hospital and Orphanage Location in Chicago, 1848-1916."

This paper uses the location quotient, a common measurement from economic geography and regional economics, to capture the specialization of criminal activity in Vancouver, Canada. Location quotients have barely been introduced into criminological research, yet they provide additional insight into crime analysis not available using crime counts and crime rates. The location quotients for automotive theft, break and enter, and violent crimes are mapped for Vancouver, Canada, and tested using social disorganization and routine activity theory as a theoretical framework. Strong support is found for these theories to predict specialization in criminal activity by interpreting their expectations in the context of crime-specific attractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent acceleration in the transition to a knowledge-based economy has affected regional economic performance. The author uses an interregional convergence framework to identify the changing determinants of the growth of U.S. states in the period from 1983 to 2004. Growth of population, annual average wages, and per capita real gross state product (GSP) are investigated. The analysis relies on spatial regression analysis to estimate the speed of convergence and identify significant conditional variables and their relationships with growth. Absolute and conditional GSP interstate convergence has occurred. The results show that educational attainment and patenting rates emerged as significant positive determinants of GSP and population growth after 1993. Educational attainment raises wages. Heavy dependence on primary production significantly reduces population, wage, and GSP growth. The speed of convergence in real per capita GSP across U.S. states noticeably slowed after 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recognition of the significance of gender divisions continues to transform economic geography, the discipline nevertheless remains highly uneven in its degree of engagement with gender as a legitimate focus of analysis. In particular, although social institutions are now widely regarded as key determinants of economic success, the regional learning and innovation literature remains largely gender blind, simultaneously subordinating the female worker voice and making invisible distinctively gendered patterns of work in the face of an increasingly feminised labour force. Focusing on the industrial agglomeration of information and communication technology firms in Cambridge, England, we first outline the nature of the inequalities in patterns of work and social interaction among female versus male employees within Cambridge's high-tech regional economy. Second, we demonstrate how these inequalities in turn constrain female employees' abilities to contribute to key processes widely theorised to underpin firms' innovative capacities and economic competitiveness. Specifically, these self-identified constraints centre on female workers' abilities to: (a) act as agents of information and knowledge diffusion between firms; and (b) use new information and knowledge once they enter the firm. Overall, our results suggest that gender issues of social equity at the level of the individual worker need to be explicitly integrated with issues of economic competitiveness at the levels of the firm and the region. This is a case not simply of female employees being socially excluded at work, but of their simultaneous exclusion from key elements of firms' productive processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores regionalism and urban decline. It discusses the debate among those who attempt to uplift inner-city neighborhoods and those who believe that change is only attainable at the regional and municipal level of politics. It also mentions the availability of extra local policies, such as mortgage interest deductions, as a contributing factor to developing outlying suburbs. It references David Imbroscio's essay on regional politics affecting individual action. The author argues that regionalism has had a negative track record in regards to promoting equality.

As interest in informal methods of regional coordination has grown, it is increasingly important to understand how alternative forms of regional governance emerge. This article addresses this question through analysis of recent attempts at regional transportation coordination in South Florida. Through a detailed case study of the creation of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, we demonstrate how informal ties among transportation stakeholders were strengthened over time in ways that eventually made possible the creation of a more formal coordinating mechanism for regional transportation policy. A formal network analysis of transportation stakeholders in South Florida further illustrates the way the strength of ties among those involved in transportation policy in the region facilitated increased regional coordination and positioned business organizations to act as policy entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of regional economic development are increasingly focused on understanding the reasons for metropolitan economic growth. The "creative capital" perspective argues that such growth is extremely dependent on the presence of four main conditions: technology, talent, tolerance, and good quality of place. This article examines evidence for the importance of tolerance in promoting metropolitan economic development. Through his analysis, Richard Florida studied the association of economic growth with the presence of gays and lesbians, bohemians, immigrants, and racial minorities. Literature confirms that diversity is an important component of economic development, although this does not appear to be fully explained by Florida's creative-cities model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of regional integration as a system of conflict resolution. It identifies key referents that integration and conflict resolution have in common such as functionalist foundations, the integrative capacity of conflict, actors and a causal mechanism of outcome creation based on compromise. The peace-building effects of European integration are examined.