Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

By using information on state of birth in the 1990 Census of the United States, the authors create a variable serving as a proxy for the distribution of adult children in 1985. This variable is then used in a two-level nested logit model to explain the 1985 – 90 interstate primary migration of elderly black people and elderly white people within the context of environmental amenities and other factors. The main findings are as follows. First, the location of adult children as well as environmental amenities are among the most important attractions for the primary migration of elderly black and white people. Their effects are stronger on white people than on black people. Because a relatively high proportion of out-migrated black adult children are located in the industrial states of the snowbelt and a relatively high proportion of their white counterparts are located in high-amenity states of the sunbelt, the attractions of adult children and environmental amenities are more prone to counter each other for elderly black people and to reinforce each other for elderly white people. Consequently, the net transfers of elderly primary migrants are small and somewhat oriented toward the snowbelt for black people, but they are voluminous and strongly oriented toward the sunbelt for white people. Second, the attraction of adult children is strong for not only the unmarried but also the married elderly, although it is somewhat stronger for the widowed aged 75 years and over. This finding can be taken as evidence for the viability of the ‘modified extended family’ system, which not only legitimizes the out-migration of adult children for career advancement but also encourages the migration of elderly parents to be close to their non-coresident children for services that require continual proximity. It also suggests that the elderly do not have a strong tendency to delay their migration toward non-coresident children until the loss of a spouse or becoming very old.

Since the 1980s, under the influence of global economic processes, there have been dramatic changes in the distribution channels of food, beverages, tobacco, and other fast-moving consumer goods in Turkey, resulting in a redistribution of both economic and social power. The outcome has been the rise of a few businesses, with others being left increasingly vulnerable in the face of a changing environment. Consequently, there has been an important power shift towards large and enormously influential corporations (active in retailing, distribution, as well as in manufacturing) from small manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers who share commonalities with each other despite belonging to different sectors. One indicator of this shift is an ever-growing resentment among traditional communities, witnessed by their lobbying efforts as they look to the state to protect them from the devastating effects of intensifying competition. In this paper, the authors adopt a political economy approach in order to understand this power shift and to incorporate the larger political economy and the effects of globalization into their analysis. They show that these changing power structures are intrinsically connected to both the government's economic policy and also to global influences. In this context, three attributes of post-1980 Turkey are of primary interest: import liberalization, the opening up of the economy to global firms, and persistently high inflation and interest rates.

The humanitarian impact of landmines was well publicised during the 1990s. The efforts by nongovernmental organisations during this decade led to an international treaty banning the production, stockpiling, and use of antipersonnel landmines. Since the late 1990s a series of important changes have occurred in the management and coordination of humanitarian demining, which are associated with the emergence of a new development discipline for those affected by landmines. I suggest that these changes have important implications for the exercise of power. I also argue, however, that this development discourse is being repoliticised through a process of ‘cadastral politics’.

The authors examine the geographical relations between small business clients and their external suppliers of business advice. The analysis is based on the stratified random sample survey carried out by the ESRC Centre for Business Research in 1999. The analysis demonstrates the importance of localisation in a simplistic sense: a large percentage of advisors are drawn from within 10 km of the client, and almost all from within 50 km for most types of advisor. There are important differences between types of advisors, with public sector advisors, chambers of commerce, and enterprise agencies being the most localised. However, the high degree of localisation is shown to be chiefly dependent on the agglomeration benefits of the accessibility and size of centres in which advisors are located. The general pattern of client – advisor relations is demonstrated to be modelled accurately by a standard spatial interaction model. A key finding is that the spatial pattern of the location of the supply of advisors, particularly the size of the business centres in which they are located, is a key determinant of choice and must be taken into account simultaneously with any role of distance which influences demand, in order to explain the pattern of choice of business advisors. This suggests that small business support policies should be focused chiefly towards small and medium-sized enterprises that have difficulty in accessing major supply sources by virtue of their locations; that is, they should be focused on rural and more peripheral areas.

Economic evaluations of investments in transportation infrastructure in general call for traffic-flow predictions. In many studies such predictions are based on a doubly constrained modeling framework, with no explicit attempts to account for possible effects from changes in the location pattern of population and employment. In this paper we focus on the sensitivity of commuting-flow predictions to specific changes in the marginal totals of a trip-distribution model. We approach this problem through a series of simulation experiments where population and employment are systematically redistributed between different zones within the region. With this procedure we provide some quantitative estimates of prediction errors that follow from the inability to take into account long-term consequences of the location pattern of firms and households. We also carry through a simulation experiment that focuses on how benefits of different road investments are interrelated, and depend on spatial-structure characteristics.

In this paper I study the choice of residence of ethnic Estonians from the Soviet Union in Estonia. The aim is to clarify the extent to which the differences in the current residence of ethnic return migrants stem from their childhood growth environment. First, the groups of foreign-born Estonians are compared based on 1989 Soviet census data. The ethnic return migrants' place of residence is significantly related to their level of education and language skills: two variables corresponding to their previous residence, migration experience, and generational belonging. Second, the survey data are used to measure how closely the return migrants' current level of education and language skills correspond to their early socialization environment. The parents' level of education and the language of childhood significantly impact upon the level of education and language skills that return migrants have today. However, the current differences in the level of education and language skills have also been influenced by their life environment in Estonia. Yet, even when the influence of the current life environment on these variables has been eliminated, the levels of education and language skills appear to be an important source of the differences in residence. Thus, the research supports the idea that an individual's earlier socialization environment has a critical impact on their choice of residence.

In this paper we examine the spatial distributions of four types of technological hazards in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area. The focus is on the locations of hazardous industrial and toxic waste sites in relation to the demographic composition of adjacent neighborhoods. Our interest is to determine whether hazardous sites, including industrial facilities in the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory, Large Quantity Generators of hazardous wastes, Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facilities, and federally identified contamination sites, are disproportionately located in areas with lower income and minority residents. We examine patterns of environmental inequity in Phoenix, a sprawling Sunbelt city with a growing post-Fordist industrial sector. First, using 1996 EPA data for four types of technological hazards, and 1995 Special Census data for Maricopa County, we employ a GIS to map the spatial distributions of hazardous sites and to analyze the demographic characteristics of census tracts with and without point-source hazards. A second methodology is used to produce a cumulative hazard density index for census tracts, based on the number of hazard zones—one-mile-radius circles around each facility—that overlay each tract. Both methodologies disclose clear patterns of social inequities in the distribution of technological hazards. The cumulative hazard density index provides a spatially sensitive methodology that reveals the disproportionate distribution of risk burdens in urban census tracts. The findings point to a consistent pattern of environmental injustice by class and race across a range of technological hazards in the Phoenix metropolitan region.

In this paper we model the structures found in the level (generation) and allocation (distribution) components of age-specific and origin – destination-specific migration flows. For the examples, we examine the regional migration patterns in the USA for four periods: 1955 – 60, 1965 – 70, 1975 – 80, and 1985 – 90. The age and migration structures are identified over time by using the logit model for categorical data. Just as model schedules can be used to capture the age patterns of fertility, mortality, and migration rates for use in indirect estimation, so too the models set out in this paper can be used to capture the spatial patterns exhibited by particular sets of age-specific and origin – destination-specific migration proportions. They then also can be used to impose these patterns on inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate data.

Any review of assessment values produced by an assessment authority for taxation purposes must use appropriate statistical methods to ensure that the assessment-to-sale price ratio analysis produces reliable results. Failure to do so can lead the reviewer to draw incorrect conclusions concerning the quality of the assessment base. It is my contention that the review of assessments in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, conducted by Harris and Lehman and published in Environment and Planning A [“Social and geographic inequities in the residential property tax: a review and case study” 33 (5) 881 – 900] produced inaccurate conclusions because of the methodologies used to analyze assessment results. In this paper I will attempt to point out some of the more common methodological errors that are made when analyzing assessed values and demonstrate methods that should be employed to produce results that are more reliable.