regions

This report focuses on the changing role and character of large cities and city regions in Canada and their importance to the future of the country. It reviews alternative definitions of what a large city is, constructs a hierarchy of Canadian cities and then illustrates how the characteristics of the largest cities differ from those of smaller places. It then identifies the key trends, challenges and opportunities of large cities, compares the performance rankings of Canadian cities with those of cities abroad, and suggests what is needed for those cities to be successful.

This report recommends ways in which universities and their municipalities can work together to achieve economic development. According to the report, great public universities have global footprints, but they are also intricately linked to their local and regional economies and to broad strategic economic development initiatives.Virginia Tech’s worthy goal of reaching the top 30 institutions in total research spending by 2010 will be doubly meaningful if it can translate into a larger benefit for the Commonwealth and the New Century Region.

The authors analyze the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional growth. The knowledge resource used in the model is R&D conducted at universities and in companies. The findings in the paper provide support for the theories that emphasize the role of knowledge for growth. However, the paper demonstrates that spatial proximity to
knowledge resources is important to materialize the positive effect of such resources.

This paper uses regional variation in labor markets, the industry structure and the educational system to explain the training decisions of firms. Using a representative firm-level data set, the results show that firms are less likely to offer training if the number of competing firms situated in the same geographical area is high.

This article identifies three types of RIS in the thirteen southern states based on a cluster analysis of twenty indicators of innovative and entrepreneurial activity. Its findings indicate that nonmetro counties near an RIS experienced more rapid population and employment growth; however, changes in nonmetro growth rates varied by type of regional innovation system. In addition, proximity to an RIS had a stronger impact on nonmetro population change than on nonmetro job growth.

To explain cross-country income differences, research has recently focused on the so-called deep determinants of economic development, notably institutions and geography. This paper uses spatial econometrics to analyse the importance of the geography of institutions. The authors show that it is not only absolute geography, in terms of for instance climate, but also relative geography, the spatial linkages between countries, that matters for a country’s gdp per capita. Apart from a country’s own institutions, institutions in neighboring countries turn out to be relevant as well.

This paper investigates the effects of new business formation on employment change in German regions. The different phases of the effects of new business formation on regional development are relatively pronounced in agglomerations as well as in regions with a high-level of labor productivity. In low-productivity regions, the overall employment effect of new business formation activity might be negative. The interregional differences indicate that regional factors play an important role.

This paper approaches the properties of the footloose entrepreneur class of new economic geography models with a unifying framework based on the indirect utility function of mobile agents. This framework allows the authors to show how specific results in the literature can be reconciled as special cases, thereby allowing them to highlight the origin of their differences.

This paper investigates the impact of learning-by-
producing on inventive activity and shows that, in both
emerging and maturing industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak during the Second Industrial Revolution. The findings suggest that scholars have over--emphasized the importance of learning-by-producing in accounting for the geographic differences in inventive activity, and underestimated the significance of technical skills or human capital amongst the population.

This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade -- the political economy forces that might drive them, and the role the WTO might play in guiding them. It suggests three things the WTO could do to help multilateralise regionalism.