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Objective/Context: During the eighteenth century, officials from different colonial powers attempted to turn the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada—present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—into an economically viable territory. The Spanish Crown embraced its most radical jurisdictional reform in centuries to exercise effective state control, extract more revenue, and defend the colonies from foreign incursions. This article explores the particularities of New Granada’s economic governance and argues that colonial officials produced local discourses of political economy to turn unfamiliar spaces into familiar places for economic, political, and military ends. In doing so, producing knowledge about the land and its resources became a key bureaucratic practice that shaped the imagining of a paradoxical territoriality in Northern South America. First, I detail the impact of political economy frameworks on imperial governance and bureaucratic practices. I then showcase how administrative narratives, mapping projects, and fiscal networks reveal the workings of Bourbon economic governance and the search for regional integration. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of archival documents consisting of a selection of evidence from chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808. Originality: Reflecting on the ways in which the pursuit of knowledge for wealth creation affected the creation of territorialities contributes to uncovering how the imperial political economy was never a top-down imposition. Local officials negotiated it vis-à-vis singular geographical realities and knowledge production practices. Conclusions: Chorographic texts were central devices of imperial reform. The search for wealth production and territorial integration occurred in colonial outposts, not in intellectual treatises in Europe. In forging New Granada as an integrated, potentially rich place, bureaucrats’ experience of moving across the territory and inscribing the landscape on paper shaped perceptions of cohesion and difference, economic dependence, and regional fragmentation. [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]

Highlights • The empirical analysis was conducted from regional and provincial perspectives. • Industrial output growth contributed the most to China’s industrial CO 2 emissions. • Energy intensity was the decisive factor in controlling industrial CO 2 emissions. • Most provinces exhibited weak decoupling effect. • The factors effects and decoupling progress show distinct spatial characteristics. Abstract This paper utilizes the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) to quantify the contributions of various factors on industrial CO 2 emissions (ICE) at both the regional and provincial levels, and then analyzes the decoupling index and its components. The main results include: (1) Industrial activity was the leading promoting factor in ICE, while energy intensity was the decisive factor for controlling ICE in most provinces. (2) Energy structure change only had a marginal impact on ICE and varied considerably across provinces. (3) The effects of various factors are distinctly diverse in different provinces; generally, the inhibiting effects only partly offset the promoting effects. (4) Most provinces exhibited weak decoupling effect, energy intensity decline was the crucial factor in their decoupling progress, while energy structure switch only played a negligible role in decoupling progress, even exerted an opposite effect in emission mitigation in some provinces, and therefore dragged down their decoupling progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most empirical applications, forecasting models for the analysis of industrial land focus on the relationship between current values of economic parameters and industrial land use. This paper aims to test this assumption by focusing on the dynamic relationship between current and lagged values of the ‘economic fundamentals’ and industrial land development. Not much effort has yet been attributed to develop land forecasting models to predict the demand for industrial land except those applying static regressions or other statistical measures. In this research, we estimated a dynamic panel data model across 40 regions from 2000 to 2008 for the Netherlands to uncover the relationship between current and lagged values of economic parameters and industrial land development. Land-use regulations such as land zoning policies, and other land-use restrictions like natural protection areas, geographical limitations in the form of water bodies or sludge areas are expected to affect supply of land, which will in turn be reflected in industrial land market outcomes. Our results suggest that gross domestic product (GDP), industrial employment, gross value added (GVA), property price, and other parameters representing demand and supply conditions in the industrial market explain industrial land developments with high significance levels. It is also shown that contrary to the current values, lagged values of the economic parameters have more sound relationships with the industrial developments in the Netherlands. The findings suggest use of lags between selected economic parameters and industrial land use in land forecasting applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, economic resilience has become a popular term in both theory and policy practice. This interest was triggered by the fact that some regional economies were extremely vulnerable, while others have managed to overcome, more or less effectively, the worse consequences of the current economic crisis. Within this context, questions arise regarding the role that policies at both the national and subnational levels can play in shaping regional economic resilience. Although high in the academic and political agenda, understanding the policy and governance aspects of resilience still remains a relatively underdeveloped area. The paper contributes to this debate focusing on an area which has been most severely hit by crises, the Region of West Macedonia, in Greece. The case study builds on the historical trajectory of the region in order to explain how different types of policies have influenced the ability of West Macedonia to respond to economic slumps and crises of the last 30 years. Evidence suggests that national protectionist policies largely explain not only resilience of the region against previous crises, but also its vulnerability towards the still ongoing economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of universities in the economic development of American metropolitan regions during the Great Recession (2007-2009) and the growth period prior to it (2001-2007). It develops a supply-side conceptual framework on the role of universities in technology-led regional economic development. Specifically, this framework highlights three 'university products' that can be explicitly defined and measured: educational services, business services, and new knowledge or technology. The empirical test of this conceptual framework finds that the presence of universities is positively associated with regional economic performance during the Great Recession, mainly via the educational services product. Findings indicate that regions with a higher level of university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates are more resilient to the economic recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport infrastructure is conceived as an important determinant of regional economic development. While this prediction especially holds from a theoretical perspective on the premises of endogenous growth theories, from an empirical perspective it is not that easy to verify this causal link, though. Measuring whether transport infrastructure indeed fosters regional development or if it is merely an endogenous reflection of the higher transportation demand in prospering regions is a challenging task. This paper analyzes the long-run effects of port facilities on regional income levels in Germany. Since it is very likely that results from standard least square estimations suffer from endogeneity problems, we base the identification on exogenous long-run instruments. In particular, port facilities built before the industrial revolution provide an adequate instrument for current port infrastructure since they are exogenous to recent economic development but the natural requirements of a port site form an experimental character of their locations. Results from German district-level data for 1991-2008 hint at a positive correlation between port locations and gross domestic product per capita, but do not provide evidence for a causal relationship regarding the instrumental variable approach. Further robustness checks with population distribution as outcome hint at positive long-run persistence effects of port infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the features of the reformed "Act East" strategy that was announced by Indian Prime minister Narendra Modi at the India-ASEAN summit in Myanmar in November 2014, its relevance and implications to Southeast Asian nations. Topics include a discussion of the policies geographic scope and strategic dept, regional economic architecture relevance and implications such as territorial disputes among conflicting regions.

Financial networks have been extensively studied as examples of real world complex networks. In this paper, we establish and study the network of venture capital (VC) firms in China. We compute and analyze the statistical properties of the network, including parameters such as degrees, mean lengths of the shortest paths, clustering coefficient and robustness. We further study the topology of the network and find that it has small-world behavior. A multiple linear regression model is introduced to study the relation between network parameters and major regional economic indices in China. From the result of regression, we find that, economic aggregate (including the total GDP, investment, consumption and net export), upgrade of industrial structure, employment and remuneration of a region are all positively correlated with the degree and the clustering coefficient of the VC sub-network of the region, which suggests that the development of the VC industry has substantial effects on regional economy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on various theoretical approaches to regional integration and regionalization in the light of globalization after the Second World War. Other topics mentioned in this article include the role of international organizations, the role of realism in international relations, and the role of the Cold War.

This paper analyzes the implementation of a regional public policy that favors the development of micro and small enterprises in Baja California's economy to mitigate a gloomy employment situation. Using estimated regression models, it was found that in a global economic crisis scenario where production and employment in large companies are constrained and workers are replaced by more technology-intensive processes, the proliferation of micro and small businesses is a compensatory mechanism to minimize the ef fects of unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with today's innovative processes impact on the enterprise location factors. It is grounded that innovations influence the economic and economy process change at the existing enterprises and are urgent. The optimal number of factors to optimize enterprises or to search new enterprises location places is formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the productive activities are not evenly within the territory, the growth process and Brazilian regional occupation was marked by economic concentration, spatial discontinuities and regional inequalities. How minimizer element, means of transport, especially railroads have facilitated various socioeconomic activities, linking centers of production and consumption, with a relevant role in capitalist expansion. The overall objective of this article is to show how railroads located in Goiás (Goiás Railroad and the North-South Railroad) have contributed to the integration of the economy, from the theories of regional development according to Hirschman (1961), Perroux (1967) and Myrdal (1972). The Railroad Ferro Goiás, implanted at the beginning of the 20th century, was an example of a transport route of penetration, integrating part of Goiás to the national economy, with the expansion of the agricultural frontier. In this sense, a favorable perspectives in terms of integration of Goiás economy have arisen with the North-South Railroad in 21st century, which is under construction in the state of Goiás, being a transport corridor between the South-Centre and the North-Northeast of the country economically integrating these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a debate about when economic development that is aimed at revitalizing America's cities and regions is charitable, focusing on job creation and business growth in the U.S. as of June 2014. America's free market economy and incentive programs for private companies in the U.S. are mentioned, along with regional economic development organizations (REDOs) and philanthropy in America in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is examined.

Abstract: Using a disaggregated energy–economy–environmental model, we investigate the economic and environmental impact of a Scottish specific carbon tax under three alternative assumptions about the use of the revenue raised by the tax: revenues raised are not recycled within Scotland; revenues are used to increase general government expenditure or to reduce Scottish income tax. We find that by imposing a tax of £50 per tonne of CO2 the 37% CO2 reduction target is met with a very rapid adjustment in all three cases if the model incorporates forward-looking behaviour. However, the adjustment is much slower if agents are myopic. In addition, the results of the model suggest that a carbon tax might simultaneously stimulate economic activity whilst reducing emissions and thus secure a double dividend, but only for the case in which the revenue is recycled through income tax. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines the success of paper-based alternative currencies in facilitating convivial, sustainable localised economies. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, it discusses the capacity of activists to create alternative forms of currency that communicate the organisers' visions of a localised economy, before examining material practices: for whom do the currencies work, and who struggles to use them? Using insights from a diverse economies perspective, the article argues that we cannot read off the likelihood of an economic actor using the currency from the extent of their local economic embeddedness: economic actors in similar positions respond to the same stimuli in different ways, and local business owners and activists can form productive alliances to develop their shared project. The article concludes by arguing that local currencies should be used more proactively to stimulate new forms of concrete local production to meet locally identified needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial models of port system evolution often depict linearly the emergence of hierarchy through successive concentration phases of originally scattered ports. The Chinese case provides a fertile ground for complementing existing works by a long-term perspective, given the early importance of river ports and seaports and the development irregularities caused by periods of closure and openness over time and across such a large land mass. In both qualitative and quantitative ways, this paper describes and analyses the changing spatial pattern of China's port system since the first unified empire (221 bc). Main results underline a certain stability of the port system with regard to the location of main sea-river gateways, notwithstanding important regional shifts from one period to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the changing trends in regional economic development policy delivery in multilevel governance systems. Although the imperatives of coordination of public policy interventions across multiple levels has generally been recognized, not enough attention has been given to how different political systems actually adapt their institutional and policy designs to effectively operate in the emergent complexity of multilevel governance systems. The article focuses on regional economic development policy governance in the province of Ontario, Canada over the past three decades, drawing insights from new regionalism, organization theory and governance literature to examine the prospects and challenges of policy delivery in politically complex multilevel systems. The case study illustrates how regional economic development policy is increasingly dictated by complex environmental and institutional forces of multilevel governance that are shaped by the particular character of a political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While earlier research has shown that regional restructuring after reunification has led to broad de-industrialization processes in eastern Germany's chemical industry, this article focuses on how re-bundling processes at the corporate level have stimulated adjustments to the changing economic and political environment leading to a renewed regional development trajectory. The analysis is based on a conceptualization that assesses diachronic processes of rupture and re-bundling by applying a bottom-up perspective of how corporate adjustments and restructuring processes generate re-bundling types that manifest themselves in broader regional re-bundling scenarios. The empirical analysis focuses on a qualitative case study of Bitterfeld- Wolfen, the eastern region with the largest chemical industry. The research provides evidence that, although new firm formation has remained weak and acquisitions of chemical multinationals have generated structures only tenuously embedded in the regional economy, modernization and re-bundling process have contributed to a renewed, smaller yet stable, regional chemical industry. The analysis further shows that the associated processes depended on the roles of individual industrial leaders in the region, who acted as network builders, mobilized joint action and stimulated the development of a collective regional spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After German reunification, interregional subsidies accounted for approximately 4% of gross fixed capital investment in the new federal states (i.e. those which were formerly part of the German Democratic Republic). We show that, between 1992 and 2005, infrastructure and corporate investment subsidies had a negative net impact on regional economic growth and convergence. This result is robust to both the specification of spatially weighted control variables and the use of instrumental variable techniques to control for the endogeneity of subsidies. Our results suggest that regional redistribution was ineffective, potentially due to a lack of spatial concentration to create growth poles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nitrate politics of the Peruvian and Chilean governments between 1873 and 1884 have been compared as the obverse and reverse of a coin, where the first one would express the state-owned monopoly and the second one the economic freedom. However, the nitrate management would show a third alternative that would have elements in common with both government politics, based on business freedom would have expected the monopoly of this economy. These economic politics are analyzed from a regional scale, questioning some concepts deeply-rooted in the nitrate historiography of Peru and Chile. The importance of the issued certificates is discussed between 1875 and 1879 by the Peruvian State to purchase the Oficinas and the document of the banks in Lima. It is also analyzed the First Nitrate Combination in 1884 and its significance in the development of the nitrate cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem, research strategy, and findings:Little research examines the effect of diversity on regional economic resilience to natural disasters. We examine whether economic diversity benefits regional economies in typical circumstances and in recovery after a natural disaster, using the case of the 1993 U.S. Midwest flood. By matching counties in the nine states affected by the flood to control counties, we isolate the influence of diversity on employment and income in normal circumstances and after a substantial shock. We found economic diversity to have mixed associations with employment and income in typical circumstances. On average, economically diverse counties tended to experience faster employment gains but slower growth in per capita income than less diverse areas. The effect of economic diversity upon resilience following a natural disaster was unambiguous. Economic diversity aided counties in weathering the downturn following the flood and sped their return to long-term patterns of employment and income growth. Takeaway for practice: In promoting policies to enhance economic diversity, planners in communities located in areas prone to natural disasters should consider both the goal of disaster resilience and the potential tradeoffs between different aspects of economic performance. Research support: None. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Assessment of regional economic impacts can be accomplished using either an input-output analysis or a social accounting matrix (SAM) analysis. While these approaches can generate important insights, they have significant limitations for some cases, e.g., the event of the need to reallocate limited resources such as land, labor, etc., because they do not include a complete set of decision makers' activities and managerial options. This study develops a flexible approach to link the firm level linear programming model to regional economic models to overcome these limitations, a LP-SAM. To demonstrate the LP-SAM a ranch-level economic model is linked to the regional SAM to investigate the impact of wildfire on the southeastern Oregon. The LP-SAM successfully traces out the decision makers' responses to wildfire and also regional economic impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thünen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and that it is in line with recent findings on a limited degree of interregional market integration in nineteenth-century Prussia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 19th century, the Spanish economy went through the early stages of the industrialisation process. This process developed in parallel to the growing market integration of goods and factors as a result of the liberal reforms and the construction of the railway network, with the subsequent fall in transport costs. In that period, there were major changes in the pattern of industrial location across Spain, with an increasing spatial concentration of industrial activities between the 1850s and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and a deeper regional specialisation. What were the forces behind these changes? On the theoretical side, the Heckscher-Ohlin model suggests that the spatial distribution of economic activity is determined by comparative advantage due to factor endowments. In turn, New Economic Geography models show the existence of a bell-shaped relationship between the process of market integration and the degree of concentration of industrial activity in the territory. This paper examines empirically the determinants of industrial location in Spain between 1856 and 1929 estimating a model that nests both Heckscher-Ohlin and NEG factors and tests the relative strength of these forces, since they are not mutually exclusive and might be at work simultaneously. The analysis of the results shows that both comparative advantage and NEG-type mechanisms were determinant drivers of industrial location in Spain, although their relative strength changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, I endorse Ron Martin's thoughtful rethinking of the concept of path dependence in a successful attempt to improve our understanding of regional economic evolution. I take issue, however, with his quick dismissal of Marxist geographical political economy as an important reference point for understanding the evolution of the economic landscape. Taking inspiration from a spatialized reading of the regulationist perspective on socioeconomic development, I argue that Marxist geographical political economy is a key reference point for any theory of regional development because it points to the importance of capital accumulation, state restructuring and collective agency in shaping economic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ron Martin's recent critique of the canonical model of regional path dependence constitutes a significant original contribution to evolutionary economic geography, and is likely to open up a whole new range of promising directions of theoretical debate and empirical research. In the first part of my commentary, I highlight and discuss the following two assumptions implicit in his work: (1) broader and less restrictive models are better than narrow and restrictive ones; and (2) economic geographers are better served by a model that emphasizes change than by one that emphasizes continuity. In the second part of my commentary, I suggest that Martin's own alternative model could be further developed by: (1) replacing the binary distinction between 'path as movement to stable state' and 'path as dynamic process' with a continuum; (2) avoiding, with the help of mereology, the hasty generalization to regional economies of processes of change originally theorized in the context of institutions; and (3) tracing the implications for evolutionary economic geography of the recent analytical work on contingency - a hitherto under-theorized concept that has been central to evolutionary reasoning in general, and to the problematic of lock-ins in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While foreign direct investment (FDI) is widely recognized as one of major driving forces on promoting the regional economic growth in China, its impact on regional productivity is unclear and less systematically investigated. This article investigates the effect of FDI on regional productivity in China. Specifically, we adopt a newly developed measure of total factor productivity (TFP) to deal with the endogenous inputs choice accompanied with various measures of FDI, enabling to provide robust estimates on the TFP effect of FDI. Moreover, we examine the role of absorptive ability on the FDI-TFP nexus and explore the existence of FDI spillover effect on productivity across regions. The potential difference in productivity effect of FDI between coastal and non-coastal regions is also examined. Based on the province-level panel dataset over the period 1997–2006, the various estimates show that the overall productivity effect of FDI is significantly positive, while this effect depends heavily on the host region's absorptive ability. Technological gap is found to associate with a significantly negative coefficient along with the finding that FDI tends to exhibit a higher impact on productivity in coastal regions than their non-coastal counterparts, highlighting a widening income inequality between coastal and non-coastal regions in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies why some clusters in a certain region are more dynamic than others, even though they all operate within the same basic innovative regional environment. We first established which variables were to be used to measure the dynamics of a regional cluster. We included both inputs and outputs of the innovative regional environment and also cluster development-related variables. We then applied this to two clusters located in the Valencian Region, Spain. The first cluster is involved in the footwear industry, while the other is involved in the ceramic tile industry. The evolution of the variables which had an influence on their dynamics was studied to determine which variables had similar behaviours and how their evolution was related to the clusters' life cycle and to the evolution of regional income. The results show that regional innovation impacts on clusters’ productivity and that when clusters lose their dynamism, employment, sales and exports are the most affected variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ahead of the 'African Conference of the Parties' (COP) scheduled to take place in Durban in November 2011, the ability to maintain an African common position will be paramount in providing a platform from which to pursue the continent's priorities on climate change. This article considers the role of international organisations in shaping the Africa Group's common position from COP15 in Copenhagen ahead of Durban. In addressing this role the analysis considers the position of the African Union and the regional economic communities, as well as the challenges facing the African Union from nested international organisation interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic growth of the regional economies, the promotion of China and the cultural resurrection of Confucianism force us to make new questions in relationship with the vague limits and borders of the new audiovisual areas. Moving away from both the old paradigm of cultural imperialism and the new one of de-territorialization, our research tries to identify the geocultural markets of the new audiovisual and cultural global order and its roots in centuries of Confucian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

We analyze a two-sector model of a trading creative regional economy (TCRE) of the sort studied by Florida. Our analysis focuses on two cases. The first case concerns the impact of faster neutral, whereas the second case concerns the impact of faster nonneutral, productivity growth in the tradable sector on the employment of creative people in each of a TCRE's two sectors. In both cases, the sign of the percentage change in the steady-state use of creative capital in the nontradable sector is ambiguous. In other words, the potential departure of creative people from the tradable to the nontradable sector does not depend upon whether the faster productivity growth being studied is neutral or nonneutral. In addition, because the effects of faster productivity growth in the tradable sector are not necessarily innocuous, a potential role exists for activist policy designed to countermand the possibly negative effects of faster productivity growth on either the tradable or the nontradable sector. This finding of possible 'uneven development' is consistent with Florida's view that TCREs can give rise to externalities such as uneven regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising focus of politicians as well as scientists in the EU on the large urban agglomerations as centres of economic growth is accompanied by political efforts to identify and to demarcate such agglomerations under the label ‘metropolitan regions’. This study develops a theoretical framework broaching the issue of cooperation between municipalities from the perspective of regional economics as well as political science. The framework is applied to the empirical case of the polycentric metropolitan region of the ‘Saxony triangle’ in east Germany. The results show that various intervening factors prevent intense co-operation between the actors in the region. Policy implications and conclusions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The three general approaches to empirical work in economics are structural, experimentalist, and descriptive. This paper provides an overview of how empirical work in regional economics fits into these three categories. In particular, I examine a single issue in the field, the nature of agglomeration benefits and the productivity gains from agglomeration, and analyze the advantages and drawbacks of following each of these three empirical approaches. I also discuss potentially fruitful ways empirical work in regional economics might advance. [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]

This paper offers a review of the effects of organized crime on regional economic development, with particular reference to the case of Italy. After reviewing the empirical studies that analyse the relationship between crime and economic development, the paper examines the regional distribution and the social costs of some crimes (in particular extortion) that can be linked to mafia type criminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of the region as a platform for achieving economic competitiveness and social equity. We use a combination of empirical exercises to examine the timing and degree of actor interest, including convergence regressions and coefficients of variation analysis to see if regional economic and social performance is more heterogeneous, and logistical analysis to determine what metropolitan-level factors can explain the rise of regionalist interest by business organizations and/or social justice organizations. We find that performance is, in fact, generally more heterogeneous, that different actors are motivated by different factors, and that interest by business groups seems to trigger a “reactive regionalism” by equity proponents (but not the other way around). [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.

The paper begins with an overview of the unemployment rate in Slovenia and focuses on duration of unemployment and regional characteristics of the unemployment rates. It is shown that the dispersion of regional unemployment rate is gradually decreasing and is also slightly below European average on nuts 3 level. The analysis of the duration of regional unemployment spells is based on the data obtained from the Employment Office of the Republic of Slovenia, which consists of the unemployment spells between January 1st, 2002 and November 18th, 2005 with more than 450,000 entries. The Kaplan-Meier estimates of the survival function are presented and the effects of region on the duration of unemployment spells are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article examines how China's war with Japan served as a crucial factor that shaped modern China's ethnopolitics. It argues that the Japanese invasion of China in 1941-1945 provided the Nationalists with an unprecedented opportunity to push their authority further westward into the Central Asian heartlands. The Nationalists' marching westward as a result of the Japanese invasion also urged them to factor frontier and ethnopolitics into their wartime strategic thinking and institutional reforms. To a great extent, the war and its repercussions caused a redefinition of modern China's border security and defense in both northwestern and southwestern China. The war with Japan turned the Nationalists westward, a new perspective which shifted the power relationship between the Nationalists and China's frontier regional leaders. This historical phenomenon resulted in the extension of Nationalist power to, and the building of, new institutions and infrastructures, in China's remotest ethnic frontier. It also contributed to modern China's first contact with the Middle East. The westward expansion during wartime also transformed modern China from a maritime economy rooted in East Asian trade to a continental one based on overland trade routes through the heartland of Asia. [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.

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."