Growth and Change最新文献

Carbon emission is the most critical environmental pollution issue today. However, regional trade and industrial linkages have changed the traditional carbon emission pattern. As a public product with strong negative externalities, carbon emissions inevitably lead to severe consequences if the market is allowed to adjust itself. Therefore, public policies made by government officials have an important role in environmental governance and emission reduction. This paper uses China's Multi-regional Input-Output (MRIO) table and official turnover data of 269 prefecture-level cities in China for the empirical test. The results show that official turnover has a significant positive impact on embodied carbon emissions between regions. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the inter-provincial turnover of officials and the turnover between regional central cities results in more significant embodied carbon emissions. Further research finds that the longer the officials stay in their previous positions or as new local government leaders, the greater the embodied carbon emissions caused by their turnover. In addition, the turnover of officials affects interregional embodied carbon emissions by promoting regional entrepreneurship, venture capital and structure transformation of industries. The findings of this paper provide essential enlightenment for optimizing Chinese local government governance and promoting the transformation of the economic development mode.

Cross-border regions have been the frontier areas of regional and subregional cooperation, the development of which involves the interaction of multiple scales and various agents. Existing studies focus mainly on cross-border economic cooperation but pay less attention to issues such as urban construction and community development, which may lead to the neglect of the interests of local communities in the development of cross-border regions. Based on a case study of the Mohan–Boten Cross-border Cooperation Zone (CCZ), this study argues for the integrated development toward “Two Countries, One Park” through the functional integration of urban planning, industrial investment, public services, and community development. The study finds that the success of the “Two Countries, One Park” pattern relies on the coordination of multi-scalar governance and multi-agent cooperation, whereas the “scale paradox” caused by the asymmetric distribution of power and responsibility among different governance scales and the relevant agents is a major hindrance to functional integration and cross-border cooperation. Addressing the “scale paradox” is, therefore, crucial for successful cross-border development.

Patent agency services are crucial for the codification of technical knowledge and inventions. Drawing on an inter-firm network analysis of the patent agency service relationships between patent agencies and their innovation clients during the last two decades in China, this paper seeks to explore the structure of urban patent agency service networks and how it is shaped by China's unique institutional and market forces. The study found that although the patent agency service network generally follows the basic structure of China's innovative and economic landscapes, it is still deeply shaped by China's unique intellectual property institutions, administrative hierarchy factors, market forces driven by patent agency service demand, and multidimensional proximities in a complex manner. Analyzing how these factors function should be related to the characteristics of patent agencies and the actors of networks. The study will help us understand how city patent service networks might be shaped by institutional and spatial factors, and provide new evidence on how cities are interlinked within patent agency service networks.

This study examines changes in spatial distribution and residential segregation patterns of immigrant groups in South Korea from 2008 to 2021. Since the mid-1990s, the immigrant community has increased rapidly; however, geographical stratification has intensified among heterogeneous immigrant groups. Foreign immigrants from 195 countries are divided into four groups based on the average income in the country of birth. Dissimilarity and multigroup entropy indices were adopted to explore the aspatial aspects of immigrant segregation. Exploratory spatial data analysis was used to examine the spatial separation of foreign clusters. The implications of these results are threefold. First, immigrant residential segregation is as serious as in developed countries and has deepened. Second, immigrants from advanced economies are concentrated in Seoul, while immigrants from upper-middle economies are clustered in the southwestern part of the capital region. In contrast, immigrants born in lower-middle class and underdeveloped countries are distributed among rural and manufacturing areas in the non-capital region. Finally, the differences in the course of economic migration according to socioeconomic background are considered to be the decisive cause of the spatial segregation of immigrants. This study challenges policymakers engaged in integrating immigrant communities in South Korea.

This paper empirically estimates the impact of the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) on economic growth across European regions. The narrative of this paper is based on the convergence club hypothesis. In this context, we implement the data-driven Phillips and Sul test to classify European regions into endogenously identified convergence clubs that tend to converge to different steady-state equilibria. We find three substantially different convergence clubs in terms of both per capita output and spatial location: capital cities and metropolitan areas (along the so-called “Blue Banana”), core countries, and the periphery. We observe a persistent core-periphery pattern in terms of output per capita among European regions with different rates of convergence. The convergence club comprising capital cities and metropolitan areas converges almost four times faster than the rest of the EU. Subsequently, we estimate club-specific growth regressions to investigate the impact of ESIF expenditures on short-run economic growth. Our main identification strategy relies on two instrumental variables, namely the spatial lag of EFSI expenditures-to-GDP and the air distance to Brussels, to address a strong endogeneity problem in strongly biased relationship between ESIF expenditures-to-GDP and short-run economic growth. Our results indicate a positive impact of ESIF expenditures-to-GDP on short-run economic growth in the second (core) and third (periphery) convergence clubs, with the impact being twice as large in the latter compared to the former. These results remain robust when adjusting the growth regressions to use ESIF expenditures-to-population instead of ESIF expenditures-to-GDP, although the pronounced difference in effect magnitude among convergence clubs diminishes.