Search results for "economic geography"
showing 10 items of 682 documents
Emergence of regional leadership – a field approach
2016
ABSTRACTEmergence of regional leadership – a field approach. Regional Studies. The complex processes associated with the emergence of regional leadership are interpreted in this paper through a field theoretical framework, and are discussed with example cases relating to green economy developments in four Nordic regions. It is argued that macro- and meso-level processes create opportunities and constraints for local agency, and how local agency can respond to this is discussed. Field theory offers a novel perspective on regional leadership because it helps one gain a deeper understanding of the various forms regional leadership can take.
FRONTIER RESEARCH IN TORNEDALEN
1970
Publisher Summary This chapter highlights frontier research in Tornedalen. In view of the general alignment of the research carried on by ethnologists, it is a matter of course that a concentration of interest to regions with administrative boundaries of such a marked character as, for example, national frontiers may often give a sharper relief to the problems considered. The interest in questions around such boundaries here leads to inter-Nordic collaboration. This is what has happened in Tornedalen, the frontier zone between Finland and Sweden. The problems around a frontier dividing a coherent settled area make themselves felt in all sectors of human community life, and, they cannot be i…
The Discursive Constitution of a World-Spanning Region and the Role of Empty Signifiers: The Case of Francophonia
2007
The cultural turn in political science, history, and political geography has opened new perspectives on the division of the world into geographic entities. Nation-states, regions, districts, etc., are no longer qualified as quasi-natural objects based upon intrinsic qualities but, rather, as contingent results of social or accordingly discursive processes. The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) defines Francophonia as an “geocultural space” (espace geoculturel) and an international community of more than 50 states. In this contribution, the concept of political communities as “imagined communities” and the advancements of discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe are used in o…
The evolution of the local role(s) of the university in a low-tech region
2013
The present case study addresses the case of a geographical area neglected by most of the literature about the changing role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): the low-tech contexts. This literature has traditionally exhibited two primary aspects. First, a focus on success stories such as entrepreneurial universities located in high-tech regions (e.g. Silicon Valley). Second, it reveals an inclination towards an evolution from ivory towers to entrepreneurial universities. The article argues that this oversimplification does not apply exactly to some environments where the HEIs have maintained links with industry since their inception. The purpose is to demonstrate HEIs' relevance in l…
Productivity, Ownership and National Chains: Evidence from the British Retail Sector
2009
Abstract This paper investigates factors explaining firms' productivity differences in the British retail sector. In particular, using simultaneous quantile regressions, it aims to uncover performance gaps stemming from foreign ownership and multinationality, as well as national scale economies. The findings suggest that foreign ownership weakly explains differences in performance across retailers. Only when firms in the upper quantiles of the TFP distribution are compared, the role of foreign ownership gains statistical significance, although with exceptions. In addition, firms able to expand their infrastructure across Great Britain possess a productivity advantage over more local retaile…
Uncertain sunset lives: British migrants facing Brexit in Spain
2020
One of the most concerned groups potentially impacted by the approval of Brexit in 2016 is that of the so-called “Brexpats”. This group of people is composed by at least 784,900 British citizens who are living in the European Union (EU), among which those settling in Spain are the most prominent. Spanish Brexpats are the largest British population outside the borders of the UK, except for in the Commonwealth territories. They have some peculiar characteristics, such as an advanced average age compared to other EU destinations; a large number of people living off the radar; geographical concentration within coastal areas; and a certain social isolation. In this context, the succession of new…
Media effects on policy preferences toward free movement: evidence from five EU member states
2020
In a time when freedom of movement is being challenged by an increasing number of European Union member states, and where immigration has been dominating public debate for years, this study investi...
Exploring social media network landscape of post-Soviet space
2019
The “post-Soviet space” consists of countries with a substantial fraction of the world’s population; however, unlike many other regions, its social media network landscape is still somewhat under-explored. This paper aims at filling this gap. To this purpose, we use anonymized data on user friendships at VK.com (also known as VKontakte and, informally, as “Russian Facebook”), which is the largest and most popular social media portal in the post-Soviet space with hundreds of millions of user accounts. Using the VK network snapshots from October 2015 to December 2016, we conduct a “multiscale” empirical study of this network by considering conn…
Stepwise migration: What drives the relocation of migrants upon return?
2021
Is Spain a lumpy country? A dynamic analysis of the ‘lens condition’
2008
We implement the ‘lens condition’ of Deardoff (1994) to investigate whether lumpiness, an excessively uneven geographic distribution of production factors, is large enough to allow for regional specialization of production at different factor prices. Using data from 50 Spanish provinces over the period 1964 to 2001, we show that Spain evolved from being a lumpy economy to a state where lumpiness no longer mattered.