Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

A rural—urban dynamics model is presented as an organizing concept to describe and analyze the regional economic structures of two Third World regions—the Kutus Region of Kenya and the Ambositra Region of Madagascar. The first region evinces strong urban—rural relationships as vibrant trade generates sustained economic growth from commercial coffee, maize, and tomato production. In the Madagascar Region economic growth has stagnated as most of the agricultural production is subsistence in nature; the rural—urban dynamics are strong only in household consumer expenditures, and the multiplier effect is large but only for a limited set of exchanges.

A new approach to migration in developing countries is used in this paper, which integrates into the migration process the experiences of moving to cities, working in urban areas, and returning to the countryside. As a result, rural labor migration is directly linked to rural development through remittances, as well as through physical and human capital brought back by return migrants. Migration information is mainly drawn from China's 1995 1% National Population Survey. Findings from other recent migration surveys are also incorporated. It has been found that patterns of temporary migration are mainly shaped by the magnetic force of the growth-pole region. Job opportunities created there in labor-intensive industries have attracted large numbers of migrants, first from the surrounding rural areas and then from the peripheral regions, enhancing migration propensity in both areas. As a result, migrations from the periphery to the growth-pole region become the largest interregional flow. With respect to the effects of temporary migration on the development of the rural origin, it is found that the enhancing effect of migration on net income is large. In some relatively poor provinces, migrants' net income can even outweigh the provincial rural net income. More importantly, a return trend has recently emerged. About 4 million migrants returned to rural areas in the early 1990s, bringing back both physical and human capital. The volume is increasing, with returnees playing a crucial role in the development of rural areas in the peripheral regions.

The authors examine the impact of civil service reform on work and employment in the civil service. The research is based on an analysis, at the national scale, of secondary-source employment data, and a case study of civil service employment in the North East of England. Important gender dimensions to employment change are demonstrated. Nationally, job losses have been concentrated in full-time work in lower administrative grades—where women predominate. In contrast, women have benefited from the growth of part-time work, again in more junior grades, and there has been less substantial employment growth in middle-ranking posts. Job loss has also been concentrated in certain geographic areas, predominantly London and a few major administrative centres in peripheral regions. A study of selected civil service departments in one of these locations, the North East of England, demonstrates that continual organisational change, intensification, and associated ‘incentivisation’ of work, as well as a growth of contracting out to the private sector, has created a climate of uncertainty and instability in the civil service. The authors also demonstrate that different salaries and conditions of service are evolving in quasi-independent agencies. They speculate about the geographical implications of such a breakup of the civil service.

In this paper I critically examine a selected set of retailer—supplier relationships in order to discern some ways in which the competitive spaces of the British food industry are actively trans-formed. It is argued that within existing research on retailer—supplier relationships the innovative capacity of retailers, their competitive strategies, and the radical ways in which they have reorganised the food supply chain remain insufficiently problematised. Against this background, I employ notions of culture, identity, and strategy in order to embrace the imaginative and creative energies which fuel the dynamism of corporate practice at the retailer—supplier interface. Corporate interviews concerning food retailers' own-brand supply relationships are drawn upon in order to ground an understanding of these energies in the organisational realities of material practices. The multiple ways in which these own-brand supply relationships are initiated and negotiated are argued to be deeply embedded in the historically and geographically specific competitive conditions which constitute the food industry, as well as being endowed with the capacity to transform the meaning of production, circulation, and consumption of food in Britain.

The primary purpose of this paper is to determine the degree to which nonmetropolitan and small metropolitan areas participate in the US information economy. It has long been known that large metropolitan areas have become integrated among themselves into the national economy, but it has been assumed that small centers remain focused on local and regional links. This study uses 1996 data from Federal Express Corporation to measure flows of packages to and from 18 pickup and delivery zones for the area served by Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport to 41 large US metropolitan areas. Although the rural and small pickup and delivery zones do not generate or attract the high magnitude of flows of large metropolitan areas, the data show that, by a variety of measures, the small centers are remarkably strongly tied to the uppermost level of the US metropolitan hierarchy.

Adjustment models are used increasingly to analyze population and employment changes in regional economies. However, questions remain about the most appropriate geographic scales and time lags for these models. In this paper we estimate a well-known adjustment model for a recent 25-year period in the USA. Regional population and employment changes (levels and densities) are examined at three scales (states, Bureau of Economic Analysis regions, counties) using various time lags (one to ten years). Two-stage least squares regression estimates, based on Regional Economic Information System data running between 1969 and 1994, are generated and discussed. Analysis is restricted to the core relationships between population and employment; the roles of other exogenous variables, normally included in adjustment models, are not considered. Instead, concern is focused on issues such as stability and directional causality of the interacting population—employment systems. Some brief suggestions regarding future research conclude the paper.

This paper gives the first systematic statistical assessment of the factors explaining the membership of sector business associations. An important aspect of the argument is the importance of differentiating associations by the types of their members because this reflects their demand orientation and their decisionmaking structures. Associations of companies (traditionally termed trade associations), individuals (traditionally termed professional associations), owner-managers, mixed member types, and federations are each different types of member bodies. The estimates in the paper, using new survey evidence, confirm the significance of these distinctions and demonstrate the different factors explaining association membership size, density of encompassing of members (as a proportion of the number of businesses in their sector, and the proportion of the sector's turnover), as well as the membership joining and lapsing rates. The results generally confirm the dominance of the logic of influence on trade associations and the logic of services on other associations. The role of sector concentration, association age, association size, and management structure are also shown to be significant explanatory variables for some association types.

Most models of people's voting intentions suggest that the choice of party to support is a function not only of external influences in the individual's home, neighbourhood, and workplace but also of their attitudes—their perspectives on society, their goals and values, their opinions on contemporary social and political issues, and their degree of attachment (if any) to the political parties and their programmes. Those models have been tested in Great Britain on many occasions, though the data employed rarely allow detailed exploration of all aspects of the many interrelationships suggested. In particular, the great majority of studies are cross-sectional in nature, and although most produce the same general findings, indicating stability in attitudes and their links to behaviour at the aggregate level, they do not allow study of whether such stability is also characteristic of individuals. With data provided by the first four waves of a large panel study of British adults (the British Household Panel Survey) this first paper in a series exploring the stability of attitude—behaviour links over time tests five hypotheses regarding the interrelations among attitudes, party identification, and voting (or voting intention) during the period 1991–94, and finds very strong support for all five.

In this paper we study the determinants of job-related fast repeat migrations of the labor force of Taiwan, based on the linked microdata of national migration surveys from 1980 through 1989. The main findings are as follows. First, the propensity to make fast return migration is negatively affected by the level of education and positively affected by the duration of unemployment, which suggests that those with a limited labor-market knowledge and an unsuccessful job search are more prone to make a return migration. Second, the propensity to make fast onward migration is strongly enhanced by the number of previous moves and negatively affected by the duration of unemployment, which suggests that more experienced and more successful previous migrants are more prone to make an onward migration. Third, those whose reason for the previous migration was job search are more likely to make a fast return migration than those whose reason for the previous migration was job change or job transfer, which suggests that those who have secured a job at the destination before moving are less likely to be disappointed and to make a fast return migration than those who migrated before securing a job. Fourth, gender selectivity in fast onward migration is very strong in terms of both overall level and age pattern, which reflects the strong dominance of patriarchal ideology on Taiwanese society.