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Drawing upon a panel dataset on China's state‐owned construction land supply at the prefecture level, this paper adopts the spatial panel data model to investigate the existence of spatial dependence in the mechanisms behind China's urban land expansion from 2004 to 2014. The empirical results show that China's urban land expansion has been mainly influenced by a quadruple process of urbanization, industrialization, globalization and decentralization. The strong existence of spatial dependence in China's urban land expansion can be reflected by the significant coefficient estimates of the spatial lags of both the dependent variable and independent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political‐administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty‐eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north‐eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make‐up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state‐incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state‐propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state‐sponsored mega‐shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications. This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in ten of its cities. The paper also identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electricity demand in South Africa has experienced vast changes both from a policy point of view and due to the country's great industrialisation and urbanisation. The literature dealing with the South African electricity case, to date, has not taken into account these changes and their effect to the symmetric behaviour of the residential and industrial electricity consumers. Hence, this paper aims at examining the asymmetric behaviour of the annual South African electricity demand (total, residential and non-residential) for the period 1960-2012. To do so, three different tests were used: the entropy test proposed by Racine and Maasoumi (2007. Journal of Econometrics 138, 2, 547; 2008. Econometric Reviews 28, 246), the conditional symmetry test proposed by Bai and Ng (2001. Journal of Econometrics 103, 225) and the Triples test proposed by Randles et al. (1980. Journal of the American Statistical Association 75, 168). The findings showed that there is weak evidence of asymmetry, given that the null hypothesis of symmetry can only be rejected at 10 per cent level of significance. Hence, econometric models examining the South African electricity demand during the same period are credible in their assumption of a linear data generating process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract There are a number of features that make South Korea an interesting place to study social policy. First, it has experienced rapid economic development with the associated changes in urbanization and demography. This change has created social problems, which the state has had to address. Second, the country retains a strong cultural tradition and repeated affirmation of the values and practices of Confucianism. In this paper, these two features are considered in relation to the way social policy has been addressed. The thrust of the paper will be on the policy responses to perceived social problems and the way in which other social problems are individualized within families. These policies are informed and shaped by Korean politics and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, rural development and politics in China has entered a new phase that revolves around what the central government calls 'agricultural modernization'. Transforming the once-dominant smallholding, family-based agriculture has become a focal point of the government's programme of rural rejuvenation, where a range of economic changes unleashed by urbanization and industrialization also converge. We argue that in this new context, agrarian change has become the key vantage point from which to study rural China. We review key contributions of the papers in this special issue and highlight their insights on rural differentiation, land politics and rural livelihoods. We discuss how studying the ' Chinese path' of agrarian transition can contribute to ongoing debates on key themes in agrarian studies, including both the agrarian questions of capital and of labour, and how agrarian political economy offers unique perspectives on the overall processes of capitalist development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to trace the steady growth and recognition of the importance of psychology in Singapore education. The development of psychology as a key element in the teaching-learning process parallels the evolution of teacher education in Singapore. Urbanisation, industrialisation, and globalisation have also acted as a collective catalyst in accelerating the establishment of psychology as a powerful aid in developing resilience in young Singaporeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to explore the political economy of Korea's industrial restructuring which has led to a postfordist-like regime of accumulation. To do this, this paper takes the Seoul metropolis as a case study. The underlying assumption is that the postfordism of Korea obtains its specificity through the metropolis of Seoul where a host of enabling conditions for postfordist regulation are concentrated. By looking into the process whereby Seoul is becoming the locale of Korean postfordism, a more serious concern is to examine the consequences which the metropolitanization of postfordism creates for urban society. It is assumed that in the course of postfordist urbanization, Seoul's social and political life has been to a great extent enriched, but at the same time is deeply schizophrenic due to its being exposed to two contrasting ultra modern and premodern socio-economic dynamics simultaneously. This urban schizophrenia derives from the processes in which Korea's postfordism operates within the context of a semi-peripheral capitalist economy. Dualization along a new class line has become a crystallized feature of postfordist Seoul's urban life.

This paper looks at the effect of the new international division of labor on urbanization in developing countries. Previous histories, particularly of insertion into the world economy, affect responses to the new order. Also, previous phases in the organization of the world economy, particularly those associated with import-substitution industrialization, have shaped the urban systems and urban social organization of developing countries in particular ways. By comparing the tendencies of the import-substituting period with those of the new international division of labor, contrasts are brought out in the patterns of migration, the shape of the urban system, labor markets, and in urban social organization. The overall change is likely to be an increasing divergence, both within developing countries and between them, in their urban organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]