Journal of Regional Science最新文献

The article discusses how social interactions and digital appropriation of technology affect the decisions of people to work or not work (labor participation) in a spatial context. An individual's decision to participate in the labor force is influenced by their neighbors in a spatial sense; that is, spatial neighborhoods affect individual choices related to labor supply. The digital appropriation index was built using intentions and uses of the internet to explain how social interactions between people affect individual labor participation. Spatial econometrics, using individual GPS data (latitude and longitude) in Cali (Colombia), show that social interaction and digital appropriation have positive externalities on labor participation—more appropriation of digital technology results in higher participation in the labor market. Direct effects show that an increase of one percent point (p.p.) in digital appropriation increases labor participation by 19.4 p.p. Indirect effects (externalities) show that an increase of one p.p. in digital appropriation increases labor participation by 8.5 p.p. These externalities of digital appropriation are interesting because active public policies oriented to the use of the Internet increase labor participation and improve labor market efficiency.

Does knowledge complexity facilitate the upgrading of industrial structures? The paper analyses whether greater knowledge complexity promotes industrial structure upgrading from the three dimensions: complex knowledge accumulation, creation and diffusion. We emphasize that the local accumulation and creation of complex knowledge can promote innovation agglomeration, characterized by frequent innovation activity and high-tech industry concentration, leading to structural upgrading. Furthermore, the diffusion of complex knowledge among regions bridges regional differences and produces spatial spillover effects on structural upgrading. We chose China, a developing country, as our research setting, and used Chinese patent data to measure the knowledge complexity of 281 cities in China from 2004 to 2016 to verify the theoretical hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that developing countries can follow a new path toward industrial structure upgrading by strengthening the innovation agglomeration effect of complex knowledge.

The study employs a difference-in-differences method, utilizing panel data from 289 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2021 to analyze the impact of e-commerce pilot city policy on the “substantial to fictitious” transformation of private enterprises' economies. Research finds that, first, when a city becomes a national e-commerce pilot city, it significantly enhances the financialization level of private enterprises. Second, the e-commerce pilot city policy has a greater promoting effect on the financialization level of enterprises in industries with intense competition, first-tier and second-third-tier cities, and regions with higher degrees of marketization. Third, the construction of an e-commerce pilot city policy affects the financialization level of enterprises by alleviating financing constraints, enhancing the perception of economic uncertainty for enterprises, and reducing internal control quality. As for the main contributions of this article, first, it provides empirical evidence for whether it is reasonable for the current government to introduce preferential policies to promote the development of the real economy; second, it helps to deepen the understanding of the effectiveness of the “National E-Commerce Pilot City” policy in the real economy in recent years; third, it provides policy inspiration for further preventing excessive financialization of enterprises and helping the private economy “moving from virtual to real.”

GDP per capita is the prevailing measure commonly employed to assess economic growth in corruption-related studies, this study highlights the limitations of such measures when examining the impact of corruption on economic performance at the sub-regional level. Instead, productivity measures are employed to evaluate economic performance in this study. Using state-level data from India, we examine the linkage between economic performance and corruption. The findings from the dynamic panel threshold model demonstrate that corruption has a growth-enhancing effect on economic performance up to a specific threshold. Moreover, the influence of government spending on economic performance is also contingent on the corruption threshold. These findings emphasize the importance to combat corruption in order for states to achieve their full economic potential.

This paper explores the impact of natural resource wealth on regional economic resilience and its transmission channels regarding entrepreneurship using prefecture-level evidence from China. Our results demonstrate a natural resource curse on economic resilience, in that more resource-rich regions have significantly less resistance to economic recessions. Furthermore, we present evidence that much of this curse operates through the channels of resource-based economy that represses entrepreneurship. Additional suggestive evidence indicates a greater likelihood of resource-rich regions being unenterprising localities, partly due to the highly standardized occupational structure and government-corruption-led deterioration of the institutional environment.