Spatial dynamics and metropolitan change

"This special issue presents contributions to a collaborative effort to analyze 'the dynamics of metropolitan processes and policies'....[It] contains four papers which focus on industrial change and economic restructuring; two papers deal with population relocation and migration processes; one paper contains a study of economic cycles in space and one paper treats the assessment of urban investment and urban renewal projects." The geographic focus is on the developed countries.     

Dynamics of metropolitan growth and unemployment

The author presents a demand-oriented model of metropolitan growth with explicit regard to urban unemployment and spatial growth. The long-term behavior of several factors, including population, is examined in response to exogenous demand growth for output     

Sectoral sources of metropolitan growth

The paper proposes a method for identifying sectoral sources of metropolitan employment growth The key feature of the VAR is the set of (over)identifying restrictions which do not require a causal ordering to be developed among industries to create orthogonal sectoral shocks. The simulations for four cities indicate that local sectoral shocks are more important than national counterparts, and that among local shocks, the overall evidence indicates that manufacturing, service and public sector employment shocks account for a substantial portion of employment growth variation, a conclusion that seems roughly consistent with export-oriented models of metropolitan growth.     

Job creation and housing construction: Constraints on metropolitan area employment growth

Differences in the supply of housing generate substantial variation in house prices across the United States. Because house prices influence migration, the elasticity of housing supply also has an important impact on local labor markets. I assemble evidence on housing supply regulations and examine their effect on metropolitan area housing and labor market dynamics. Locations with relatively few barriers to construction experience more residential construction and smaller increases in house prices in response to an increase in housing demand. Furthermore, housing supply constraints alter local employment and wage dynamics in locations where the degree of regulation is most severe.     

Modelling structural change using the Kalman Filter

Structural change is endemic in the Eastern European economies and the newly emerging Commonwealth of Independent States, yet conventional econometric modelling techniques proceed under the assumption that there is a structurally stable true economy to be discovered. This paper explores the consequences of endemic structural change for econometric modelling by considering the model reduction problem when the data generation process is itself undergoing structural change. The resultant econometric model, it is argued will generally exhibit time varying parameters where much of the structural change is reflected in the changing parameters. The use of Kalman Filters to estimate such changing parameters is then discussed and a range of specifications which allow the inclusion of different forms of identifying information is given. The paper then illustrates these ideas by modelling the determination of the black market exchange rate in Poland over the period from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s.This paper was written as part of the A.C.E. project Methodology, Econometrics and Understanding the East European Economy in Transition.     

The problem of population and growth: a review of the literature from Malthus to contemporary models of endogenous population and endogenous growth.

This review traces the evolution of literature on population and economic growth through the main paradigms suggested to explain the observed covariation of per capita income and population levels (or their rates of growth) over time and space, and determine which public policies will improve the human condition. As the main paradigms evolved, key variables were progressively treated as endogenous (instead of exogenous) to the growth process. After the introduction, section 2 looks at the "classical model" of Malthusian population theory and its refinements. Section 3 identifies empirical data that bears on the secular and cross-sectional association between levels of rates of growth of population and per capita income. The inconsistency of these data with the classical model helps explain declining interest in this model over time and increased interest in a more systematic type of population and growth theory. The beginning of this new interest is traced in section 4 with a look at the "neo-classical growth model" and the reformulated theory of population, which was based on Becker's work on fertility behavior. The first line of inquiry branching from these theoretical works (section 5) treats population as an endogenous variable in static and dynamic settings. The second line of inquiry (section 6) analyzes population and growth within a unified model of growth and development. In section 7, recent studies of key policy issues (population control policies, mandatory social security schemes) are surveyed. The concluding section notes that contemporary research must face the challenge of providing additional insights into longevity as an aspect of economic growth and development and of developing a model of endogenous population and economic growth based on heterogeneous agents.     

Egalitarianism under population change: Age structure does matter

We study the compatibility of the optimal population size concepts produced by different social welfare functions and egalitarianism meant as “equal consumption for all individuals of all generations”. Social welfare functions are parameterized by an altruism parameter generating the Benthamite and Millian criteria as polar cases. The economy considered is in continuous time and is populated by homogeneous cohorts with a given life span. Production functions are linear in labor, (costly) procreation is the unique way to transfer resources forward in time. First, we show that egalitarianism is optimal whatever the degree of altruism in “perpetual youth” model, that is when lifetime span is finite but age structure does not matter: in this case egalitarianism does not discriminate between the social welfare functions considered. Then we show that, when life span is finite but age structure matters, egalitarianism does not arise systematically as an optimal outcome. In particular, in a growing economy, that is when population growth is optimal in the long-run, this egalitarian rule can only hold when the welfare function is Benthamite. When altruism is impure, egalitarianism is impossible in the context of a growing economy. Either in the Benthamite or impure altruism cases, procreation is never optimal for small enough life spans, leading to finite time extinction and maximal consumption for all existing individuals.     

兰州都市圈建设研究

近年来,都市圈理论的引入和创新发展,对西部尤其是西北地区中心城市区域的发展意义重大.文章首先强调了都市圈发展模式的特点,接着分析了兰州都市圈建设的必要性,最后,提出兰州都市圈建设目标、原则与时序.     

The smartization of metropolitan cities: the case of Paris

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Although the smart city literature is continuously increasing these last decades, there is still a need to better understand what make their...     

On Modelling Speculative Prices: The Empirical Literature

Traditionally, financial theory and in particular asset pricing models have assumed (implicitly or explicitly) a certain probabilistic structure for speculative prices. The probabilistic structure is usually defined in terms of specific statistical models and relates to the dependence, heterogeneity and the distribution of such prices. The primary objective of this paper is to trace the development of various statistical models proposed since Bachelier (1900), in an attempt to assess how well these models capture the empirical regularities exhibited by data on speculative prices.     

论大城市发展的问题、挑战与对策

本文认为大城市发展与“大城市病”没有必然的因果联系。在知识经济和城市化大潮的冲击下 ,我国应及时调整城市发展战略方针 ,适当发展大城市 ,并树立新的管理理念 ,实行政府管理与社会管理相对分离的对策。     

城市管治与地区中心城市竞争力的提升

遵循改革开放以来制度变迁主线,以市县关系为切入点,从城市管治的角度重点探讨地区中心城市行政区域经济强化而中心城市本体实力和综合功能却相对弱化的原因,从制度创新和非制度因素创新两个方面分析并提出了提升地区中心城市竞争力的对策和措施.     

The metropolitan hierarchy of occupations: An economic interpretation of central place theory

The usefulness of central place theory, as a general explanation of the spatial distribution of activities in a system of cities and of the spatial ordering of urban places within that system, clearly relies on economic phenomena. Christaller's original formulation of the theory was similarly economic in basis, yet economic phenomena have been ignored in subsequent empirical testing of the theory. These tests, chiefly by geographers, have relied on population size as the chief, if not sole, determinant. This paper demonstrates that an economic explanation is a necessary component of the general theory of central places. Moreover, explicit economic variables not only alter the ordering of activities based strictly on demographic size, but generally offer a more powerful explanation of ordering.     

Integrating parametric and non-parametric multivariate analysis of urban growth and commuting patterns in a European metropolitan area

Quality & Quantity - Mono-centric regions have experienced a progressive transformation towards polycentric structures. Transition to discontinuous and dispersed spatial configurations was...     

都市圈与“省直管县”的冲突与协调

回顾了中国改革开放以来城镇化的发展进程,指出了城镇化当前的发展趋势,根据都市圈的形成机理和管理体制模式,针对当前省直管县体制改革,分析了都市圈发展和省直管县存在的矛盾和冲突,并提出了针对性的建议。     

Determining the contribution of technical change, efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth in the privatized English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: 1985–2000

The water and sewerage industry of England and Wales was privatized in 1989 and subjected to a new regime of environmental, water quality and RPI+K price cap regulation. This paper estimates a quality-adjusted input distance function, with stochastic frontier techniques in order to estimate productivity growth rates for the period 1985–2000. Productivity is decomposed so as to account for the impact of technical change, efficiency change, and scale change. Compared with earlier studies by Saal and Parker [(2000) Managerial Decision Econ 21(6):253–268, (2001) J Regul Econ 20(1): 61–90], these estimates allow a more careful consideration of how and whether privatization and the new regulatory regime affected productivity growth in the industry. Strikingly, they suggest that while technical change improved after privatization, productivity growth did not improve, and this was attributable to efficiency losses as firms appear to have struggled to keep up with technical advances after privatization. Moreover, the results also suggest that the excessive scale of the WaSCs contributed negatively to productivity growth.     

美国大都市区规划管理经验及启示

随着经济全球化与区域经济一体化发展 ,如何有效管理以促进大都市区经济的空间整合 ,日益成为国内外关注的焦点。本文分析和总结了美国大都市区规划管理的经验 ,在此基础上对我国大都市区的行政分割有效治理提出了建议。