Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper the work of geographers, economists, and management scientists in studying interregional and international expansion by service companies is reviewed. A critique is presented of some of the fundamental methodological problems inherent in analysing foreign-market entry-mode choice. These are particularly apparent when studying the process of business service-sector internationalisation. Issues discussed include inconsistencies in the definition of which entry decision to analyse; the level of aggregation to adopt when modelling mode choice; mode choice and cooperative organisational networks; different approaches to measuring cultural distance and country risk; and the methodologies used to develop scales to represent the constructs relevant to internationalisation.

The role of immigration in national development has returned to the forefront of domestic policy debates in many developed countries. Two common aspects of the domestic policy debate are focused on the consequences of the concentration of immigrant groups within a small number of the largest cities within any national system of cities and the movement of immigrants from smaller urban places and nonurban places to the largest cities over time. Two challenges emerge. The first is to identify the impact of postarrival migration. The second is to understand the processes underlying this redistribution, particularly if public interventions are planned which seek to influence these internal distributions.

In this paper, the authors briefly review the findings of an earlier study on the patterns of both regional and metropolitan redistribution of immigrant groups in Canada. Against this back-drop, a hierarchical model of migration for immigrant groups for the period 1981–86 is developed and estimated. The internal redistribution of immigrants through postarrival migration has continued to be focused on metropolitan areas in general and on Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal in particular. The distribution of previous immigrants plays a significant role over and above that of economic circumstances both in retaining immigrants in a particular city and in attracting members of immigrant groups from other cities.

Given that geographers excel at measuring and explaining spatial variations in attributes, it is surprising that they are not more aware that relationships may vary over space. It is still normal practice, for example, to estimate a set of parameters in a model and to assume that the relationships represented by these values apply equally to all locations and in all directions. Recently, however, there have been several applications of Casetti's expansion method that have been focused on measuring anisotropic trends around locations. Here this technique is used to examine possible anisotropy in distance-decay relationships around origins. That is, the authors attempt to answer the question: does the rate of distance decay vary with direction? The conclusions reached in previous research on this topic are only partially supported here. Via US migration data, it is suggested that although there is evidence of directional variation in distance decay around some origins, and this evidence leads to some interesting insights into the mental representation of space by US migrants, it is impossible to identify any overall trend across origins in directional variability.

Declarations of societal shift, economic transition, and the dawning of a new era have now become commonplace in social science, particularly in the analysis of economic forms. In this paper, three influential accounts of economic change are examined and are found to be overwhelmingly concerned with identifying new orders, paradigms, or modes of accumulation. First, regulation theory is described. Although this perspective is valuable in its focus upon institutional ensembles and interrelations, it lapses all too easily into structuralism; that is, these institutional ensembles can be explained by their structural ‘coupling’ to the mode of production and the mode of regulation. Second, flexible specialization is considered. Here again the explanation of new industrial forms is distinguished from their description by the use of ‘ideal types’. These types define the contours of the new era. Last, networks are also identified as the dominant organizational form of the post-Fordist era. The argument proposed here is that networks are not new and are insufficiently distinct from other forms of organization, yet they do help to focus attention on network analysis. Drawing upon the work of actor-network theorists, such as Callon, Latour, and Law, I argue that networks must be analyzed from within; that is, we should seek to follow network builders as they weave together heterogeneous materials. Thus, explanation emerges only once description has been pursued to the ‘bitter end’. It is from within the processes of economic change that our own accounts must be constructed, and this militates against theatrical declarations of new orders, eras, etc. We must explain by using the descriptions of network construction and not by recourse to some underlying historical logic.

Defining urban morphology in terms of the shape and density of urban land use has hitherto depended upon the informed yet subjective recognition of patterns consistent with spatial theory. In this paper we exploit the potential of urban image analysis from remotely sensed data to detect, then measure, various elements of urban form and its land use, thus providing a basis for consistent definition and thence comparison. First, we introduce methods for classifying urban areas and individual land uses from remotely sensed images by using conventional maximum likelihood discriminators which utilize the spectral densities associated with different elements of the image. As a benchmark to our classifications, we use smoothed UK Population Census data. From the analysis we then extract various definitions of the urban area and its distinct land uses which we represent in terms of binary surfaces arrayed on fine grids with resolutions of approximately 20 m and 30 m. These images form surfaces which reveal both the shape of land use and its density in terms of the amount of urban space filled, and these provide the data for subsequent density analysis. This analysis is based upon fractal theory in which densities of occupancy at different distances from fixed points are modeled by means of power functions. We illustrate this for land use in Bristol, England, extracted from Landsat TM-5 and SPOT HRV images and dimensioned from population census data for 1981 and 1991. We provide for the first time, not only fractal measurements of the density of different land uses but measures of the temporal change in these densities.

In this paper it is shown that there is no support in economic theory for the suggested trade-off between jobs and the environment. Moreover, improved environmental quality may accelerate economic growth via improved health and productivity of workers, lower maintenance costs, and enhanced productivity of capital inputs. Also, empirical evidence is presented on the preference of the general public regarding environmental quality. The empirical evidence indicates that people are ready to trade part of their income for improved environmental quality.

Since the mid-1970s, Vietnam experienced a period of transition to socialism, before bringing in economic reforms which led to the gradual dismantling of the subsidised system of planning and the opening up of the country to the global capitalist economy. Economic reform and renovation has important implications for the urban areas of Vietnam. The emergence of markets and the abandonment of many restrictions on travel resulted in a freeing up of the urbanisation process during the 1980s and early 1990s. These processes are considered, and the implications for Vietnam's largest urban area, Ho Chi Minh City, are examined. The likely impact of Vietnam's long-term socioeconomic strategy on the urban network in the remainder of the decade is considered.

An approach to analysing data for spatial clustering is outlined, with special reference to environmental epidemiology. The method is based on recent developments in spatial point-process modelling; specifically, on the use of so-called ‘second-order’ analysis of bivariate point patterns. This continuous-space approach offers some advantages over analytical methods that aggregate health events to areal units. The method is implemented within the framework of a proprietary geographical information system, ARC/INFO, and is illustrated with reference to health data from a questionnaire survey of children in Preston (Lancashire). The nature of the data gained from the questionnaire means that variables which may affect the health of the children studied can be accounted for within the analysis.