Engineering the Financialization of Urban Entrpreneurialism: The JESSICA Urban Development Initiative in the European Union

Urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberal urban governance are assuming new forms under finance‐dominated accumulation. We examine and contribute to theorizing the mechanisms through which urban governance is financialized, taking as a case study JESSICA, one of the European Union's initiatives to implement an ‘urban sensitive’ policy for sustainable and integrated development. Like other initiatives promoting financialization, JESSICA deploys the logic of finance to select and fund urban social initiatives and development projects on the basis of their potential return on investment (ROI). Understanding this process requires placing questions of political economy—how urban governance is shaped by the broader political‐economic context—with questions of governmentality—how stakeholders are enrolled in and come to take for granted new governance initiatives. Following the multi‐scalar institutional infrastructure is crucial to understanding how this works. Taking a relational multi‐scalar approach, we trace how changes at the supranational scale filter down to shape urban policy selection and performance in Sofia, Bulgaria, where we document how ROI calculations conflict with social welfare priorities. Contrasts between the trajectory of financialization of urban governance in the European Union and the United States demonstrate how this is geographically variegated, shaped by the broader context/conjuncture within which such financialization is embedded.     

Capital market integration in ASEAN: A non-stationary panel data analysis

Motivated by the establishment of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, we examine saving-investment relationship in various subgroups of ASEAN to assess their capital market integration. The results from second generation panel unit-root and cointegration tests that account for cross-sectional dependence as well as estimates of long-run saving-retention rate provide some evidence of market integration in ASEAN. The analysis of short-run dynamics suggests that capital mobility in ASEAN during 1980–2014 appears similar to that in OECD countries during 1970–1999. More importantly, across different panel estimators and subgroups of membership, there is considerable heterogeneity among the member countries. The saving-investment association is very weak, thereby implying very high capital mobility, in more developed members such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei; the association is very strong, implying very low capital mobility, for much less developed members such as Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The results call for renewed effort to develop capital markets in less developed nations and integrate them with the rest of the membership in ASEAN. In this paper, we also address several major shortcomings of the original Feldstein-Horioka framework.     

Leaving state sector employment in Russia

I analyse the reallocation of labour and human capital from the state sector to the non‐state sector and non‐employment in Russia. I use a nationally representative household dataset, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, to study sectoral mobility in early transition using summary measures of mobility and multivariate discrete choice models. The results show that sectoral mobility varies between different skill groups, and in particular that those with university education, with supervisory responsibility and in white‐collar occupations are less likely to leave state jobs for both non‐state employment and non‐employment. The results suggest that in the early stages of transition in Russia mismatch of skills across state/non‐state employment was significant and that non‐state employment consisted mostly of low skill, ‘bad’ jobs.     

Family and sex-specific U.S. immigration from Europe, 1870–1910: A panel data study of rates and composition

This paper develops and estimates models of family and sex-specific emigration, as well as the sex composition of this emigration, from 12 European source countries to the U.S. for the period 1870–1910. The models are based on the distinction between economic migrants (males, single females, and some married females) and tied or trailing migrants (females) and are estimated with panel data, including data that relate to the occupational/industrial structure of male and female economic activity in source countries. Hausman-Taylor instrumental variable estimates suggest that although both males and females responded to labor-market signals, males were more responsive than females to per capita GDP differences. Moreover, compared to the rest of Europe, Ireland, and Scandinavia were the sources of many young, single male, and female migrants, who responded strongly to gaps in economic opportunities. In fact, much of the European response to such gaps appears to be due to migrants from Ireland and Scandinavia. Females tended to originate in English-speaking countries and countries that were agriculturally oriented. Service and manufacturing jobs in source countries discouraged the migration of females relative to males. Males tended to follow recent migrants more than females, but females responded more to long-term influences as measured by stocks of migrants from their source countries who had previously settled in the U.S. Countries with high birth rates had relatively fewer female emigrants, whereas those with high rates of natural increase 20 years earlier experienced relatively more male emigration. Intact families, other family members (including family-strategy male migrants and trailing female migrants), and single males and females responded strongly to economic incentives, but the singles were most responsive followed by family-strategy males.     

Changing composition of human capital The Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland1

We show that business education/occupations have expanded and that technical education/occupations have contracted in the Czech Republic and Poland since 1990. We interpret these changes as an adjustment necessary for their transition to a market economy. We do not find the same pattern in Hungary, which we attribute to the earlier timing of its transition. We construct an aggregate model in which labour reallocates in response to changing demand structure. When calibrated with the Czech and Polish data, the model generates a large movement of workers with technical education and experience into business occupations in the early 1990s. The discounted sum of output loss due to the gap between the demand structure and the composition of existing human capital amounts to between 8 and 40 percent of 1990 GDP.     

CREDIBILITY, MACROECONOMIC FUNDAMENTALS AND MARKOV REGIME SWITCHES IN THE EMS

The main objective of this paper is to use the Markov regime‐switching modelling framework to describe and analyse the credibility of a number of countries participating in the European Monetary System during 1980–1998. Our credibility indicator, based on Hughes Hallet et al.'s (1997) methodology, is subject to discrete regime shifts and is made dependent on macroeconomic fundamentals. We carry out extensive testing to assess the specification of the Markov regime‐switching model and the potential existence of permanent breaks. A contribution of our paper is the specification of a multivariate Markov switching model that allows us to examine whether macroeconomic variables have asymmetric effects on credibility. Another contribution is the specification of a regime‐switching model with time‐varying transition probabilities, which enables us to determine whether changes in macroeconomic variables can trigger switches between the low and high credibility regimes. We find strong evidence of regime switching behaviour in all countries. Both the level of credibility and the transition probabilities display an asymmetric response to changes in macroeconomic variables, with the stance of fiscal policy exerting the most systematic influence in all countries.     

The European high-speed train network: Predicted effects on accessibility patterns

The principal aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the future European high-speed train network on accessibility, by reducing time distance between places and modifying their relative location. We compare the current situation with that foreseen for the year 2010, according to the Outline Plan of the European High-Speed Train Network, in order to analyse which areas will most benefit from construction and improvement of the infrastructure. It is hypothesized that the high-speed train will certainly bring the peripheral regions closer to the central ones, but will also increase imbalances between the main cities and their hinterlands. A weighted average distance indicator is applied for this purpose. This measure identifies the spatial distribution of accessibility in the area of study, emphasizing the infrastructure effects, and locates accessibility changes at the European level. A Geographic Information System (GIS) has been used to carry out this study.     

Vertical intra-industry trade and foreign direct investment in East Asia

As economic integration in East Asia progresses, trade patterns within the region are displaying an ever-greater complexity: Though inter-industry trade still accounts for the majority, its share in overall trade is declining. Instead, intra-industry trade (IIT), which can be further divided into horizontal IIT (HIIT) and vertical IIT (VIIT), is growing in importance.In this paper, we set out to measure and examine vertical intra-industry trade patterns in the East Asian region and compare these with the results of previous studies focusing on the EU, to which such analyses so far have been confined. Based on the supposition that VIIT is closely related to offshore production by multinational enterprises, we then develop a model to capture the main determinants of VIIT that explicitly includes the role of FDI. The model is tested empirically using data from the electrical machinery industry. The findings support our hypothesis, showing that FDI plays a significant role in the rapid increase in VIIT in East Asia seen in recent years. J. Japanese Int. Economies 17 (4) (2003) 468–506.     

China's regional income disparityAn alternative way to think of the sources and causes1

Using data on China's provincial economies for the period 1978–2005, we decomposed the causes and factors that have contributed to inter‐regional per capita income disparity. Variance in capital per employee and variance in capital elasticity are found to be the two main sources of income disparity while the employment–labour force ratio is shown to be an important factor in containing the rise of income disparity. An analysis on inter‐regional factor reallocation effects reveals their relatively small and insignificant contributions to overall growth performance. It is also discovered that capital has in most years flowed in the right direction to pursue higher marginal productivity across provincial economies. Inter‐provincial labour movement, on the other hand, had not displayed significant equilibrating effects until institutional reforms started to allow freer inter‐regional labour mobility in later years. Generally, we conclude that market‐oriented factor mobility has played a crucial role in equalizing factor returns as well as enhancing growth efficiency across regions.