Regional and urban economics, applied microeconomics

This work examines the problems of Rapid Urbanisation in Port Harcourt as a cosmopolitan city which has attracted migrants from all parts of the world, and these problems have attracted the attention of both the State and Federal Governments because of the realization that if the present pace of urbanization is not checked, the benefits of urbanization will be counterproductive. Therefore, this study looked at the extent to which the housing stock is replenished, the pace of urbanization and how it matches the rate of employment generation, how well was the provision of infrastructures such as roads, social services, etc. whether they were adequate to meet the needs of the bourgeoning populace, and whether the mono-city status of Port Harcourt accounts for the congestion and criminal activities experienced in Port Harcourt. Primary and secondary data were collected and analysed. Our findings revealed that the mono-city status of Port Harcourt contributed greatly to the congestion of the city and accounts for the criminal activities experienced to a large extent. Abstract-This work examines the problems of Rapid Urbanisation in Port Harcourt as a cosmopolitan city which has attracted migrants from all parts of the world, and these problems have attracted the attention of both the State and Federal Governments because of the realization that if the present pace of urbanization is not checked, the benefits of urbanization will be counterproductive. Therefore, this study looked at the extent to which the housing stock is replenished, the pace of urbanization and how it matches the rate of employment generation, how well was the provision of infrastructures such as roads, social services, etc. whether they were adequate to meet the needs of the bourgeoning populace, and whether the mono-city status of Port Harcourt accounts for the congestion and criminal activities experienced in Port Harcourt. Primary and secondary data were collected and analysed. Our findings revealed that the mono-city status of Port Harcourt contributed greatly to the congestion of the city and accounts for the criminal activities experienced to a large extent. We also observed and found that the pace of urbanization of Port Harcourt does not match the employment generation expected of it; and that the provisions of infrastructure such as roads, social services etc. were inadequate to meet the needs of the burgeoning population of Port Harcourt. The Government is advised to put in place certain developmental policies in a well-articulated manner to improve the living standards of the populace.

A review is presented of the requirements of a framework for the delineation of housing market areas (HMAs) in the context of undertaking a housing market assessment. This prompts adoption of a methodology that features an iterative application of information obtained from estate agents, to identify HMA cores, and a functional regionalisation of 2001 Census interward migration fl ows. The approach is demonstrated using data for North West England. The concluding section explores some implications of the HMA framework for policy and future research.

Previous crises are distinguished from the present one. Rather then relying on consumption-led growth it is explored whether any lessons can be learned from China's strategy by focusing on investment-led growth in three phases: (i) Infrastructure spending, (ii) focus on rural areas to stimulate demand, and (iii) speeding up of economic growth in new regions, generating housing demand leading up to consumption led growth. This strategy made China a darling of both foreign direct investment and portfolio investment suggesting while the global equity markets were in turmoil, China has emerged as safe parking lot for the global funds.

The present work represents the synthesis of a Master Degree Project Work to be developed, which is also a first hypothesis for a future Doctorate. In this sense, among its central goals are the purpose of making a comparative analysis of local development processes at a metropolitan scale, namely the competitive advantages that local and metropolitan political powers may have over the Central State in what concerns the creation of favorable measures for companies’ productivity and competitiveness, as well as the study of new forms of democratic political participation, namely around Territorial Governance. Although not analyzed in this article, we pretend to use Lisbon and Barcelona Metropolitan Areas as future case-studies.

Most studies of city branding are written from a marketing or management perspective. This book is different, as the micro-management issues of city branding are discussed within a broader macro-theoretical or structural context while analysing questions from the point of view of local economic development and industrial policy.

Conceptual tools are provided to assist branding in global inter-city competition. But the text is not just a toolkit for city marketing, but a theoretically oriented description of the preconditions and means of economic city profiling and restructuring on a highly competitive global scene.

In this sense the book is theoretically oriented and contextual, and it approaches the branding challenge from the point of view of urban political economy, as reflected in the concept of the informational city, the growth machine thesis and the world city hypothesis.

Airports are the nodes on which air transport networks are based. Airport choice decisions are particularly relevant with an increasing air travel demand world-wide. The analysis of origin airport in multi-airport regions has a well established tradition in transportation and regional economics. The main goals of the paper pertain to the estimation of the relevance of the different attributes in determining origin airport choice including the specific role of attribute cut-offs; the estimation of statistically significant alternative specific variables to be used for policy simulations; the inference of significant socioeconomic segmentations to provide valuable suggestions for demand segmentation purposes. We used stated choice experiments to elicit agents' preferences, and employed multinomial logit models for estimation. The study concentrates on a multi-airport region in central Italy (Marche and Emilia Romagna) where 4 competing airports are located. The models estimated on the 165 available interviews provided relevant information for all the research goals.

Most firms that process rubber in Sri Lanka do not comply with national water pollution control standards. This study seeks to estimate a pollution tax that could motivate firms to meet these standards. The authors use data from 62 rubber producing firms in Sri Lanka over three years to estimate a marginal cost function for pollution abatement. They then estimate the taxes that would bring firms into compliance. The tax rate necessary for environmental compliance is 26 Sri Lankan rupees per 100 grams of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) per year. While the burden of a pollution tax on the average firm would be 8.6% of annual turnover, the tax burden varies with the size of the firm. The authors suggest that the use of such an economic instrument might motivate the Central Environmental Authority to monitor effluents more carefully and firms to make use of effluents.

The adoption of administrative boundaries as approximations of housing markets has long restricted the scope for housing market analysis and planning policy development to be undertaken within a functional housing market framework in England. This has prompted consideration of the value of deriving housing market areas (HMAs) to underpin the development of housing market intelligence for planning and policy purposes. Drawing on a case study of North West England, this paper critically reviews alternative approaches that have been used to define HMAs. The review highlights that in practice technical and methodological constraints have restricted the operationalisation of an idealised conceptualisation of HMAs.

The paper reviews international scientific research on the delineation of local labour market areas (LLMAs) used in a range of contrasting countries for administrative and statistical purposes. The concept of LLMA is discussed, emphasising the spatial ‘clustering’ of interaction between labour supply and demand. The paper develops a taxonomy of methods and suggests that identifying best practice has so far been held back by a lack of clear criteria for objectively evaluating different methods. The paper then outlines a research agenda for further development of LLMA delineation methods, including the suggestion of more cross-national research.

Keywords: local labour market areas, functional areas, regionalisation, commuting, travel-to-work

This paper shows that an exogenous increase in accessibility of local language content leads to an increase in demand for internet connectivity among native speakers. Internet connectivity provides enormous improvements in quality of life as well as opportunities for the newly connected, yet recent attempts to connect the current 'next billion' in places such as sub-Saharan Africa have not met expectations. In places where infrastructure has come online and prices have gone down, the expected consequent increase in usage was not observed.

The paper presents the results of research of agriculture of the countries of the Western Balkans in the period of 2002-2009. Specifically, general economic (GDP per capita, share of agriculture in GDP, inflation rate, and unemployment rate), resource (share of arable land in the total utilized agricultural land, of employees in agriculture in the total number of employees, and of rural population in the total population), and value indicators (value added of agriculture in % of GDP, value added of agriculture per employee in agriculture, producers' prices of wheat, corn, and bovine milk, share of agriculture in the values of export and import) were compared.

This paper examines the effects of international remittances on regional economic development using spatial data from an original household survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova. I analyze remittance flows with a model that estimates regional (urban and rural) budget shares of consumption and investment expenditure categories for rural and urban households. An important contribution of the paper is that it analyzes the effect of remittances in the regions where spending takes place, which is not necessarily the same as the region where the households originating this spending reside. Using the multinomial logit approach, I control for potential selectivity and endogeneity biases of remittances. The results show that remittances lead to significantly increasing marginal productive investments in urban regions at the expense of rural regions. The fundamental finding of the study is that remittances influence the flight of productive capital out of rural areas into urban regions (a pattern similar to the crowding-out effect of the Dutch Disease). The analysis carried out in this paper can be applied to other temporary income transfers and exogenous spending injected in the region that affect households' regional expenditure patterns.

One of the features of the wheat market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the existence of marked regional differences: wheat prices in coastal Spain were higher and less volatile than those of inland regions. The aim of this paper is to explain these differences. The analysis is based on the so-called homogeneity condition and Fogel’s method for calculating the slope of the demand curve. According to the former, the sum of price elasticities, income and substitute goods must be equal to zero. Fogel’s method makes it possible to estimate the elasticities of demand without contemporary data on prices and consumption. This study draws two main conclusions. First, wheat price elasticities in Spain are not markedly different from those across the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, the demand curve in inland regions is slightly more rigid than that of the rest of the country. Second, income elasticities grew slightly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This preference for wheat reveals an improvement in market conditions and the standard of living.

The paper analyses factors influencing the destinations chosen by 13 different categories of migrant engineers in the USA between 1994 to 1999. Migration patterns are analysed with the aid of fractional-response regression models. The objective is to assess the relative weight of employment opportunities and selected amenities in guiding the migratory shifts of these workers. Engineers are divided into two categories representing individuals of working age and those who are either retired or are close to retirement. The results indicate that local employment opportunities have a dominant impact on the destinations chosen by the former group and that amenities play virtually no role in this regard. However, warmer winters have some modest positive effect on destinations chosen by the latter group.

Research efforts in the early 1990s uncovered an apparent relationship between rates of productivity growth and levels of investment in core infrastructure by the public sector in developed economies. If valid, these findings account for most of the widely reported slowdown in U.S. rates of productivity growth since 1970s, and lend a measure of intrinsic worth to government intervention in the national economy more fundamental than a
merely countercyclical role. This review (a) outlines the central results of the dozens of research efforts mounted since then that attempt to explain the U.S. productivity slowdown; (b) retraces the findings of the researchers most noted for their linking of infrastructure investment with productivity
changes; (c) recapitulates the criticisms to which they have been subjected in recent months; and (d) summarizes the main issues that divide protagonists and antagonists in this arena. Finally, I introduce a set of empirical and theoretical issues that bear heavily on these issues, but have not been given adequate attention by researchers on either side of the debate.

"Cross-border interactions offer privileged insights into the dynamics of micro- or Afro-region-building. The strategies observed often cultivate reach without size, gain leverage without sovereignty and muster space without controlling territory. In  stark contrast with the reified landscape of African regionalism, the analysis of cross-border interactions also points to the need to revise a number of conventional assumptions about cross-border interactions. De facto regional spaces can develop independently from boundary-lines and span through bonds that proceed from cognitive interactions rather than territorial affiliation and citizenship. Regionalisation can also proceed from the exploitation of boundary disparities or distortions on a rent-seeking basis. Cross-border regionalisation also and most importantly points to states where the opportunities for survival and accumulation associated with cross-border interactions are vital for large sections of the population and sometimes the state itself.

The study of cross-border interactions refers to the exposure that borderland areas confer to local, national and global strategies. Micro-regionalism represents an entry-point for the study of broader issues and agendas. Micro-regionalism does not stand for parochialism or provincialism. The implicit hierarchy associated with the distinction between macro- and micro-regionalist schemes is devoid of much meaning from the vantage point of substance. Micro-regionalism, as the preceding chapters emphasize, is more about the crystallisation of broader issues, than about the emergence of a specific path to region building that may be instrumentalized by policy-makers. Cross-border regionalism refers to the visibility conferred to the 'glocal' nature of micro-strategies. Micro-regionalism, in this sense, contrasts with contextual and cognitive representations of cross-border interactions as a peripheral area of investigation.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the progress in socioeconomic conditions across the major states of India by using convergence hypothesis. Earlier studies that examined regional disparities of development used per capita State Net Domestic Product (SNDP) as an important proxy for assessing human well-being. This study attempts a more comprehensive assessment of socioeconomic convergence in terms of critical indicators of economic inequality, poverty ratios, literacy rate and Human Development Index (HDI) along with per capita SNDP. The results reveal that in the period between 1981 and 2011, statistically significant absolute and conditional Beta (β)-convergence in literacy rates and HDI have been observed but only conditional β-convergence has been evident in case of per capita SNDP and poverty ratios. β-convergence estimates for the recent period (post-2001) show, a divergence in per capita SNDP and poverty ratios but convergence in literacy rates and HDI. Kernel density plots for socioeconomic indicators show the existence of convergence clubs but not absolute convergence among all the major states. Thus, this study suggests that use of the non-parametric convergence measures is crucial to gain more clear insights on socioeconomic progress and to identify the short-term divergent paths.

In this paper the determinants of the individual decision of commuting are analysed through a logistic regression analysis conducted using individual data from the Spanish 1991 Census of Population and Dwellings for the region of Valencia (one of the few Spanish regions where the question “place of work” was included in the Census form). For so doing commuting is treated as a dichotomous variable that is assigned the value of one when the individual commutes between different localities and the value zero in the opposite case. This transformed variable is explained through a simple utility model in which commuting is a function of three different vectors of personal, professional and environmental characteristics. These vectors integrate many of the variables that have been considered fundamental by previous literature. In the section devoted to the discussion of the model the results are interpreted putting them in relation with previous research. In the following section the utility model for explaining commuting and its estimation through a logistic regression is formalised and the set of variables finally included briefly justified.