Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

We study the impact of a high-speed connection between two regional economies on the location of production activities, using the simple plant-location problem and toy networks. As expected, the relative value of fixed production costs to transportation costs is crucial in the determination of facility locations. Less expected is the fairly strong instability observed in the structure of the locational pattern of facilities when the relative value of the fixed costs changes. The construction of a piece of infrastructure has an impact on the regional structure of production provided that it allows for a substantial reduction in transport spending. When scale economies in production are large, one regional center swallows up the other and may eventually become the only production center within the integrated economy.

In this paper, I undertake a reexamination of recent cycles of boom and bust in the US commercial property markets. I apply aspects of the post-Keynesian investment theory developed by Hyman Minsky to understand the causes of hyperextended building cycles, with particular attention paid to the 1980s boom. Periods of rampant overbuilding are found to be rooted in the distressed conditions of the commercial banking sector, which drove the banks to annex the commercial property markets as outlets for surplus credit capacity and to offset declining rates of profit. I explore how the existence of commercial property at the intersection of markets for space and markets for capital assets introduces distortions into the capital supply process and exacerbates tendencies towards overproduction and crisis. Conditions prevailing in the 1980s are contrasted to the current economic expansion, and the performance of the commercial property markets through 1999 is analyzed, to distinguish further the key control functions exercised by the commercial banks over market outcomes.

Studies of entrepreneurship increasingly focus on the context of entrepreneurship, rather than on the characteristics of the entrepreneur. Arguing that the inability of particular firms to control high-skill labor is responsible for a critical component of contemporary entrepreneurship—technologically based spin-offs—the author provides a theoretical basis for the effects of career dynamics on entrepreneurship. A theory of entrepreneurship, drawing on human capital theory, skills–opportunity theory, and internal labor-market theory, links declines in firm market share to a disequilibrium in labor-market matches. That imbalance leads to the breakdown of control and the consequent generation of spin-offs. Combining theory with qualitative and quantitative evidence, support is drawn from a study of the US semiconductor industry from its beginning until its early maturity in the mid-1970s.

Based on a large transnational research project that involved questionnaires with 1000 farm households in nine EU countries and Switzerland, this paper investigates factors influencing farmers' participation in agri-environmental schemes (AESs). Analysis of motivations for AES participation highlights that complex patterns of AESs are in operation. Pronounced geographical differences in farmers' reactions towards schemes can be identified, with responses by farmers from northern member states often differing from those in Mediterranean countries, and with arable farmers often responding differently from grassland farmers. Yet, the study also highlights that much common ground exists and that conceptual frameworks for the understanding of farmers' participation in AESs developed in the United Kingdom can be successfully applied outside the British context. Common participation patterns include the importance of financial imperatives and ‘goodness of fit’, and the influence of similar sets of factors such as farm size, tenure, or farm type. The growing importance of conservation-oriented motivations for AES participation across Europe suggests the emergence of a ‘new hypothesis’ which highlights that the financial imperative for participation does not necessarily exclude an often equally important environmental concern. The paper concludes by indicating where current agri-environmental policy (AEP) may be failing adequately to address structural and socioeconomic characteristics of targeted farming populations, and by arguing that understanding participation decisionmaking is only the first step in an attempt to assess the ‘effectiveness’ of AEP. Further comparative research is needed to investigate in detail more complex indicators of scheme success, in particular what effects scheme participation has on farmers' incomes, farmers' environmental attitudes, and on the environmental quality of the countryside targeted by AESs.

We deploy aspects of Foucault's concept of governmentality to discuss the argument that the recent shift towards a ‘rights and responsibilities' agenda in urban policy is part of broader transformations in the rationalities and techniques of government. Following Rose, we characterise the emergent forms of urban policy as part of ‘advanced liberalism’ or strategies which seek to activate citizens, individually and collectively, to take greater responsibility for their own government. Such strategies are, as Rose notes, seeking to govern through the instrumentalisation of the self-governing properties of the subjects of government themselves in a whole variety of locales. We develop the argument in three parts. The first part justifies the use of a Foucauldian framework in seeking to understand the new political and policy agenda on ‘rights and responsibilities’. In a second part, we investigate the changing nature of governmental rationalities and techniques of governmentality primarily through the context of the Single Regeneration Budget. In so doing, we consider two interrelated dimensions of the rationalities and techniques of government which seek to shape and guide what Foucault refers to as ‘the conduct of others' or those that are the objects of government, that is, active citizens. These dimensions are government through community and the specification of subjects of government. We conclude by specifying the importance we attach to using a Foucauldian framework for the analysis of urban policy and policy processes more generally.

In economic theory and practice, technological developments and changes in relative prices lead to changes in the input mix of one or more industries. Via intersectoral and interregional relations, this affects the entire production structure. In analysing the structural changes in an economy, changes in the input coefficients are a major determinant. Typically, however, this determinant is not unravelled further into its underlying sources. In the present paper we apply the RAS method to decompose the input coefficient changes into column-specific, row-specific, and cell-specific changes. They indicate the change in the intermediate input intensity of a sector, the average substitution of the intermediate goods and services provided by a sector, and the sector-specific substitutions, respectively. The method is applied to input–output tables of European Union member states, as issued every five years between 1965 and 1985. The usefulness of the RAS method as a descriptive tool is established.

The current pattern of industrial development in Arab settlements in Israel represents, above all, adaptation to restructuring processes operating throughout the Israeli economy. The result may be viewed as a form of peripheral industrialization of small plants specializing in less-advanced industrial production. The peripheralization process and the fact that Israeli Arab industry has remained marginal to the national economy should be understood in the context of the structural conditions in which Arab entrepreneurship is embedded. The impact of three forces is stressed: government policy, large corporations, and the internal sociocultural properties peculiar to the Arab population in Israel.

The resulting form of industrialization is based on restructuring processes formatted as a number of distinctive development stages, which must be understood within the wider framework of Israel's economic restructuring. The dominant form of capitalist production affected the transformation of the Israeli Arab economy at each period, from state management to corporate dominance, and currently succeeded by a new accumulation regime affected by globalization processes. Furthermore, majority–minority relations affected it with each pole embedded in its own ethnic milieu. These majority–minority relations, supported by a selective government policy, have since been superseded by the relations conducted between the Jewish-dominated core and the Israeli-Arab-subordinated periphery. The result of this process has diversely affected both economic poles, and continues to influence the form of Arab industrialization, branch selection, and rate of plant openings. Furthermore, the result is a failure by Arab entrepreneurs to penetrate the more privileged sectors of the national economy, partly because of the failure of the Israeli political and economic elite to respond to Arab efforts at expansion into the larger economy.