Papers in Regional Science最新文献

We investigate the effect of domestic armed violence brought about by insecurity on the geography of freight mobility and the resulting differential access of regions to global markets. There is a preponderance of evidence from the micro-level analysis of Colombia-U.S. export shipping records that export freight shipping from inland regions was re-routed to avoid exposure to domestic armed violence despite extended landside and maritime shipping distances. The discrete choice model shows that the shipping flow was curbed by the extended re-routing due to localized domestic armed violence. The results highlight that security must be accommodated for sustained freight mobility and export-oriented economic development in the Global South.

This paper addresses inequalities in the economic growth of municipalities in Pernambuco, one of the states in Northeast Brazilian most vulnerable to climate change. The study uses longitudinal data from the 2010 s to identify economic convergence clubs. This paper estimates the role of determinants of economic growth by club. The main results reveal the existence of several convergence clubs with different investment sensitivities to production. With the same amount of investment, the municipalities in the semi-arid region are less sensitive in developing their economies compared to other regions. These findings suggest that disparities among semi-arid and non-semi-arid areas will increase over time without compensatory policies.

This study analyzes the geographical patterns of aid in 38 sub-Saharan African countries from 2001 to 2020, focusing on the extent of spatial exclusion in aid allocation at the regional level. By incorporating the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) with aid expenditure data, we reveal that more impoverished regions, as defined by higher MPI scores, receive less aid compared to regions with high urbanicity. This pattern of exclusion shows significant spatial clusters within adjacent regions within and across countries and has persisted over the years. The allocation of sector-specific aid also exhibits a mistargeting issue. These findings emphasize the need to formulate aid strategies to promote spatial inclusivity in African countries.

Innovation is key for economic growth and well-being. The capacity for innovation, however, is profoundly influenced by the quality of local institutions. Although the impact of national institutions on innovation is well-documented, the effects of subnational institutional variations on innovation remain underexplored. This paper studies the impact of government agency reforms, designed to enhance local government effectiveness, on the innovation performance of city-regions in China. We examine the adoption of these reforms between 2009 and 2016 as an exogenous shock to regional institutions. Our analysis identifies a positive and significant relationship between improvements in institutional quality and the innovation performance of Chinese city-regions, particularly pronounced in regions with medium to high levels of innovation. The results are robust to a series of checks including placebo and endogeneity tests and potential confounding policies. This research highlights the critical role of government institutions in driving innovation across China, bringing to the fore important regional variations in the adoption of government agency reforms that are defining the country’s innovation landscape.

Tech clusters play a growing role in knowledge-based economies by accommodating high-tech firms and providing an environment that fosters location-dependent knowledge spillovers and promote R&D investments by firms. Yet, not much is known about the economic conditions under which such entities may form in equilibrium without government interventions. This paper develops a spatial equilibrium model with a competitive final sector and a monopolistically competitive intermediate sector, which allows us to determine necessary and sufficient conditions for a tech cluster to emerge as an equilibrium outcome. We show that strongly localized knowledge spillovers, skilled labor abundance, and low commuting costs are key drivers for a tech cluster to form. With continual improvements in infrastructure and communication technology that lowers distance decay in knowledge spillover or coordination costs, tech clusters will eventually be fragmented.

Urban gravitational zones (UGZ) are related to cities' functions and population size. In strategic regional territorial planning adequate tools and detailed data are rarely used. This issue is not foreign to Croatia and other countries. How should the UGZ be accurately delineated for each city? A combination of Huff's model and GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA) was used to delineate UGZ. In total, 95 criteria grouped into ten functions were used. The research resulted in a new methodological framework for deriving the urban hierarchy model, a tool that allows automation and simplification of the GIS-MCDA, and an urban hierarchy model of 20 major cities in Croatia.

By applying the smile curve concept to regional value added growth rather than to levels, the paper claims that local value-added growth increases when a region is specialised in scarce natural resources or scarce human skills within a GVC. Under these circumstances, in fact, the region can establish favourable terms-of-trade. The results obtained at European regional level clearly show that regions rich of high and scarce skills and natural resources are those gaining the most out of GVCs’ participation, witnessing the existence of a “dynamic smile curve” and opening the issue of increasing regional inequalities in a period of global integration.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) are vital for safeguarding and enhancing foreign investments, pivotal in Global Production Networks (GPNs). This study assesses the impact of BITs on GPNs driven by EU multinational enterprises, with a focus on regions hosting corporate headquarters due to their influence on the local economy. While considering the endogeneity of BITs and their diverse effects on GPN structures, our findings reveal a positive correlation between BITs and GPNs, notably stronger in less globally integrated regions. Additionally, the influence varies based on firms' network role (headquarters or subsidiaries) and the spatial distribution of headquarters. BITs stimulate GPNs in less internationalized regions but have minimal impact in headquarters-rich regions.