The paper examines the debates regarding place-neutral versus place-based policies for economic development. The analysis is set in the context of how development policy thinking on the part of both scholars and international organizations has evolved over several decades. Many of the previously accepted arguments have been called into question by the impacts of globalization and a new response to these issues has emerged, a response both to these global changes and also to nonspatial development approaches. The debates are highlighted in the context of a series of major reports recently published on the topic. The cases of the developing world and the European Union are used as examples of how in this changing context development intervention should increasingly focus on efficiency and social inclusion at the expense of an emphasis on territorial convergence and how strategies should consider economic, social, political, and institutional diversity in order to maximize both the local and the aggregate potential for economic development.

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The case for regional development intervention: place-based versus place-neutral approaches*

We propose an integrated framework to discuss the empirical literature on the local determinants of agglomeration effects. We start by presenting the theoretical mechanisms that ground individual and aggregate empirical specifications. We gradually introduce static effects, dynamic effects, and workers' endogenous location choices. We emphasise the impact of local density on productivity but we also consider many other local determinants supported by theory. Empirical issues are then addressed. Most important concerns are about endogeneity at the local and individual levels, the choice of a productivity measure between wage and TFP, and the roles of spatial scale, firms' characteristics, and functional forms. Estimated impacts of local determinants of productivity, employment, and firms' locations choices are surveyed for both developed and developing economies. We finally provide a discussion of attempts to identify and quantify specific agglomeration mechanisms.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/DP10174.pdf?abstractid=2503404&mirid=1&type=2

The Empirics of Agglomeration Economies

The importance of R&D investment in explaining economic growth is well documented in the literature. Policies by modern governments increasingly recognise the benefits of supporting R&D investment. Government funding has, however, become an increasingly scarce resource in times of financial crisis and economic austerity. Hence, it is important that available funds are used and targeted effectively. This paper offers the first systematic review and critical discussion of what the R&D literature has to say currently about the effectiveness of major public R&D policies in increasing private R&D investment. Public policies are considered within three categories, R&D tax credits and direct subsidies, support of the university research system and the formation of high-skilled human capital, and support of formal R&D cooperations across a variety of institutions. Crucially, the large body of more recent literature observes a shift away from the earlier findings that public subsidies often crowd-out private R&D to finding that subsidies typically stimulate private R&D. Tax credits are also much more unanimously than previously found to have positive effects. University research, high-skilled human capital, and R&D cooperation also typically increase private R&D. Recent work indicates that accounting for non-linearities is one area of research that may refine existing results.

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Public r&d policies and private r&d investment: a survey of the empirical evidence

Contents: Introduction: The New Paradigm of Evolutionary Economic Geography 1. The Aims and Scope of Evolutionary Economic Geography Ron Boschma and Ron Martin PART I: CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES IN EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 2. Generalized Darwinism and Evolutionary Economic Geography Jurgen Essletzbichler and David L. Rigby 3. The Place of Path Dependence in an Evolutionary Perspective on the Economic Landscape Ron Martin and Peter Sunley 4. Complexity Thinking and Evolutionary Economic Geography Ron Martin and Peter Sunley 5. The Spatial Evolution of Innovation Networks: A Proximity Perspective Ron Boschma and Koen Frenken PART II: FIRM DYNAMICS, INDUSTRIAL DYNAMICS AND SPATIAL CLUSTERING 6. Entrepreneurship, Evolution and Geography Erik Stam 7. Pecuniary Externalities and the Localized Generation of Technological Knowledge Cristiano Antonelli 8. The Relationship between Multinational Firms and Innovative Clusters Simona Iammarino and Philip McCann 9. Emergence of Regional Clusters: The Role of Spinoffs in the Early Growth Process Michael S. Dahl, Christian R. A stergaard and Bent Dalum 10. A Social-Evolutionary Perspective on Regional Clusters Udo Staber 11. Evolutionary Economic Geography: Regional Systems of Innovation and High-tech Clusters Philip Cooke and Carla de Laurentis PART III: NETWORK EVOLUTION AND GEOGRAPHY 12. Clusters, Networks and Economic Development: An Evolutionary Economics Perspective Elisa Giuliani 13. Reputation, Trust and Relational Centrality in Local Networks: An Evolutionary Geography Perspective Stefano Denicolai, Antonella Zucchella and Gabriele Cioccarelli 14. The Evolution of a Strategic Alliance Network: Exploring the Case of Stock Photography Johannes Gluckler 15. Complexity, Networks and Knowledge Flows Olav Sorenson, Jan W. Rivkin and Lee Fleming 16. The Geography of Knowledge Spillovers: The Role of Inventors' Mobility Across Firms and in Space Stefano Breschi, Camilla Lenzi, Francesco Lissoni and Andrea Vezzulli 17. Growth, Development and Structural Change of Innovator Networks: The Case of Jena Uwe Cantner and Holger Graf PART IV: INSTITUTIONS, CO-EVOLUTION AND ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 18. An Evolutionary Approach to Localized Learning and Spatial Clustering Anders Malmberg and Peter Maskell 19. Path Dependence and Path Plasticity: The Co-evolution of Institutions and Innovation - the German Customized Business Software Industry Simone Strambach 20. On the Notion of Co-evolution in Economic Geography Eike W. Schamp 21. Locked in Decline? On the Role of Regional Lock-ins in Old Industrial Areas Robert Hassink PART V: STRUCTURAL CHANGE, AGGLOMERATION EXTERNALITIES AND REGIONAL BRANCHING 22. The Evolution of Spatial Patterns over Long Time-Horizons: The Relation with Technology and Economic Development Jan Lambooy 23. The Information Economy and its Spatial Evolution in English Cities James Simmie 24. An Evolutionary Model of Firms' Location with Technological Externalities Giulio Bottazzi and Pietro Dindo Index

/pdf/the-handbook-of-evolutionary-economic-geography-1ojgfnkqcj.pdf

The Handbook of Evolutionary Economic Geography

Megacity growth in the developing world is fueled by a desire to access their large local labor markets. Growing megacities suffer from high levels of traffic congestion and pollution, which degrade local quality of life. Transportation technology that allows individuals to access the megacity without living within its boundaries offers potentially large social benefits, because individuals can enjoy the benefits of urban agglomeration while not paying megacity real estate rents and suffering from the city’s social costs. This paper presents evidence supporting the claim that China’s bullet trains are playing this role. The bullet train is regarded as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in passenger transportation developed in the second half of the 20th century. Starting in 2007, China has introduced several new bullet trains that connect megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with nearby cities. Through facilitating market integration, bullet trains will stimulate the development of second- and third-tier cities. By offering households and firms a larger menu of location alternatives, bullet trains help to protect the quality of life of the growing urban population. We document that this transport innovation is associated with rising real estate prices in the nearby secondary cities.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/14/E1248.full.pdf

China’s bullet trains facilitate market integration and mitigate the cost of megacity growth

Geography and Trade

Book Reviews

This essay examines the kaleidoscopic and abridged perspectives on three early modern principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania), whose lands are now part of modern-day Romania. I examine travelogues and geography texts describing these Eastern European territories written by Marco Polo (1579), Abraham Ortelius (1601; 1608), Nicolas de Nicolay (1585), Johannes Boemus (1611), Pierre d’Avity (1615), Francisco Guicciardini (1595), George Abbot (1599), Uberto Foglietta (1600), William Biddulph (1609), Richard Hakluyt (1599-1600), Fynes Moryson (1617), and Sir Henry Blount (1636), published in England in the period 1579-1636. The essay also offers brief incursions into the representations of these geographic spaces in a number of Shakespearean plays, such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as in Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare and Wilkins. I argue that these Eastern European locations configure an erratic spatiality that conflates ancient place names with early modern ones, as they reconstruct a space-time continuum that is neither real nor totally imaginary. These territories represent real-and-fictional locations, shaping an ever-changing world of spatial networks reconstructed out of fragments of cultural geographic and ethnographic data. The travel and geographic narratives are marked by a particular kind of literariness, suggesting dissension, confusion, and political uncertainty to the early modern English imagination.

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

Papers

Geography and Trade

Book Reviews

Epitomes of Dacia: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania in Early Modern English Travelogues