Cropland use,yields, and droughts: spatial data modeling for Burkina Faso and Niger

For countries with recurrent droughts, the design of drought impact mitigation measures could benefit from analyses of determinants of yields and prices of local crops at regional and district level. This study applies dynamic spatial panel data regression models to yields and prices of four major food crops across regions of Burkina Faso and Niger, over sample periods between 1984 and 2006. Results lend support to mainly simultaneous spatial spillovers, particularly for millet and cowpea prices and sorghum yields in Niger, and maize yields in Burkina Faso. After accounting for these effects, most crop yields are found to be weakly price‐responsive, as envisaged by a supply‐side geographical diffusion hypothesis. Seasonal rainfall elasticity estimates suggest that dominant food crops have slight advantage margins in terms of relative resilience to rainfall shortages. However, this result is to be weighed against low millet yields in Niger, and marked drops in sorghum yields during officially declared droughts in Burkina Faso.     

Spatial externalities and agglomeration in a competitive industry

We introduce spatial spillovers as an externality in the production function of competitive firms operating within a finite spatial domain under adjustment costs. Spillovers may attenuate with distance and the overall externality could contain positive and negative components with the overall effect being positive. We show that when the spatial externality is not internalized by firms, spatial agglomerations may emerge endogenously in a competitive equilibrium. The result does not require increasing returns at the private or the social level, increasing marginal productivity of private capital with respect to the externality, or location advantages. In fact agglomerations may emerge with decreasing returns to scale, declining marginal productivity of private capital with respect to the externality, and no location advantage. The result depends on the interactions between the structures of production technology and spatial effects as shown in the paper. No agglomerations emerge at the social optimum when spillovers are internalized and diminishing returns both from the private and the social point of view prevail. Numerical experiments with Cobb–Douglas and CES technologies and an isoelastic demand confirm our theoretical predictions.     

Moving out or living on a mound? Jointly planning a Dutch flood adaptation project

All over the world spatial flood risk management policies are on the rise. This paper analyses the planning process for the Overdiepse polder, a so-called “Room for the River” project in the Netherlands. After high water in the 1990s, the Dutch government changed its flood risk management policy. While before 2000 it leaned heavily on dikes to separate water from land, after that year spatial measures to “let the water flow” were introduced. This required the integration of two formerly separated policy domains: flood risk management and land use planning. In the densely populated and economically highly developed Netherlands, returning space to the river unavoidably impacts on the lives and livelihoods of those who live and work along the rivers. Therefore, such spatial measures to decrease flood risk have to be negotiated with various stakeholders. The planning process towards making the Overdiepse polder suitable for temporary water storage deserves more in-depth analysis. We describe and analyze the development of relationships between key actors in the planning process, with a focus on planning practices rather than on assumptions about the existence of certain types and qualities of relationships. We conclude, among others, that citizen involvement can, under specific socio-political and institutional conditions, build trust among stakeholders and increase local legitimacy for interventions by government agencies. However, it should not be idealized as “self-governance” or assumed to be part of a unidirectional change in water interventions towards new relationships between actors.     

The Role of Built,Human, Social,and Natural Capital in Determining Land Values,and the Influence of Demographics upon this Relationship

Abstract

We use various statistical methods to compare the extent to which different households are willing to invest in and pay for access to four types of capital—built, human, natural, and social. We further assess to what extent such preferences can be predicted by a measure of neighbourhood demographics. We develop indicators for each of the four types of capital at the census block group level for Baltimore, MD, USA. We use analysis of variance to examine differences in these indicators between demographic groups and multiple linear regression to examine the influence on unimproved land values of the four types of capital.     

Insurgent Building: Emerging Spatial Politics in the Bedouin–State Conflict in Israel

In the conflict between Bedouin representatives and government authorities in the southern Israeli Negev, the term ‘insurgent building’ refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by the Israeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contested Bedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent building relies on the ability of media and advocacy organizations to mobilize behind the issue. Most of the relevant scholarship takes the interpretative categories advanced by these actors at face value. Following anthropological debates regarding objectification and categorization, I examine the context of a specific case of insurgent building. Emerging political actors who employ insurgent building often rely on predefined ethnic categories and clear‐cut people–state polarities. This case demonstrates the need for a more differentiated understanding of multilayered local dynamics than the one offered by mainstream linear interpretations. At a more abstract level, political actors contribute to the reproduction of the very categories against which they mobilize.     

The Capitalization of Public Services and Amenities into Land Prices — Empirical Evidence from German Communities

Applying the hedonic approach to land prices, this article investigates the capitalization of public services and pure amenities in a cross section of German communities. Possible spillover effects from neighboring municipalities are explicitly included in the analysis and prove to be of considerable importance. Estimates of the impacts of local attributes on land prices are obtained taking into account the spatial structure among unobserved variables. The results confirm that differences in land prices are largely attributable to local conditions and policies. This implies a significant degree of mobility as well as high estimation of local attributes on the part of German households.     

Local poverty reduction in Chile and Mexico: The role of food manufacturing growth

This paper analyzes the relationship between local poverty and food manufacturing growth in Chile and Mexico using propensity score matching, differences in differences and spatial econometrics methods. We focus on food manufacturing as a sector with a number of characteristics that make it potentially pro-poor, and whose incentives for spatial distribution may either strengthen or dampen its poverty reduction potential. The overall results indicate growth in food manufacturing employment contributes to local poverty reduction.     

空间计量视角下经济增长收敛检验:回顾与展望

目前,基于空间计量模型方法检验经济增长收敛的众多研究成果尚缺乏系统的总结梳理。透过空间计量理论模型的发展脉络,归纳了空间效应识别检验方法、空间计量模型的两大代际划分——截面数据模型和面板数据模型、空间计量模型的估计方法。按国家、省区、市县三个地理层级对运用空间计量模型检验经济增长收敛的实证研究成果进行总结评述,分析了空间截面数据模型的局限性和空间面板数据模型的相对优势,并针对空间面板数据模型在实证中遇到的问题,提出进一步研究发展的方向,即在大数据背景下,利用空间面板数据模型进行经济增长收敛机制的检验。     

Incorporating spatial equity into interurban road network design

Methods for the road network design problem, typically, are based on optimization of the network efficiency measures (e.g. network-wide travel time) under a predefined budget. In these approaches, equity issues are not taken into account and, consequently, most of the road improvements are planned next to large cities. Thus, disparities between large and small cities increase, which does not conform to sustainable development objectives. In this paper, to overcome concerns associated with traditional methods, equity is incorporated into the interurban road network design problem. To this end, accessibility concepts are employed. However, unlike previous studies, instead of maximizing the total accessibility, a new definition is proposed for inaccessibility, and total inaccessibility is minimized throughout the network. Using this new definition not only is more compatible with the equity issue, but also helps to eliminate the nonlinearity of the problem. Average travel time to neighboring opportunities is utilized to propose this definition for inaccessibility, which captures the reality more effectively. With the aim of this definition, equity is incorporated into the road network design problem implicitly. This is another improvement over previous methods, where a new term in the objective function or a new constraint is added to include the equity. The proposed model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem, where the objective is to minimize the aggregate inaccessibility over all the population centers in the network. To illustrate the application of the model, the Northwest region of the United States is used as the case study. The respective exact solution of the example is found using a commercial solver (CPLEX). This new solution is also compared with the solutions from the traditional methods.     

HEDONIC PRICE INDEXES FOR RESIDENTIAL HOUSING: A SURVEY,EVALUATION AND TAXONOMY

Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for this purpose. I consider here some developments in the hedonic methodology, as it is applied in a housing context, that have occurred in the last three decades. A number of hedonic house price indexes are now available. However, it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other. For this reason I attempt to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic indexes, and then show how existing indexes fit into this taxonomy. Also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field. In particular, greater use needs to be made of spatial econometric and nonparametric methods to exploit the increased availability of geospatial data. The main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with those of the repeat‐sales and stratified median methods. The overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages.