Urban Studies

Cities in the US and Europe have chosen increasingly to offer incentives designed to attract and retain local economic development. The increased use of local incentives has occurred with little or no empirical test of their effectiveness. This paper contains a statistical method that can be applied to any group of cities to measure the 'additive effect', or lack of it, that incentives exert on local economic development. Regression analysis applied to cities in the Detroit metropolitan area indicates that incentive efficacy depends on city-specific characteristics and how economic development is measured. Although there are situations where incentive offers exert an additive effect on local economic development, in a majority of situations this is not the outcome.

This paper examines the application of Porter's analysis of the competitive advantage of nations to understanding why one British local economy, Coventry, changed from a position of relative competitive disadvantage during the 1970s and early 1980s to one of advantage during the remainder of the 1980s. Each of Porter's four determinants of competitive advantage-supply conditions, demand conditions, firms, and clusters of activities—was found to have had some influence on explaining the change in Coventry's competitive advantage. With the qualification that analyses focus on processes of change and account is taken of the alterations in emphasis needed by changing the scale of analysis from national to local economies, Porter's ideas deserve a wider application and critical examination than they have hitherto received in local and regional economic studies.

During the later 1980s, support for public-private sector partnerships came to the fore in British urban policy. This paper explores one particular manifestation of partnership in an English provincial city, the Sheffield Central Area Study, within the context of growth coalition and regime theories. Analysis of agendas adopted by partners and questions of power, suggests that existing theories do not satisfactorily account for experience within partnerships. In particular, in the British context, conceptualisations of partnership need to embrace questions such as the relatively strong position of local government and its professionalised bureaucracy, and the commensurately weaker status of the business community in general and landowners in particular.

At the end of the 1980s, almost a quarter of the labour force in Amsterdam was without a job. This was about twice the Dutch national average. In the 1970s and the early 1980s, the unemployment rates of Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole, differed only slightly. Among the unemployed in Amsterdam, the proportion of members of the minority population rose considerably. Remarkably enough, the strong divergence manifested itself at a time when employment in Amsterdam began to increase for the first time in almost 20 years. This paper tries to find explanations for this urban paradox by using the mismatch approach. This approach turns out to be insufficient to explain the Amsterdam unemployment problem.

There is increasing consensus among policy-makers and scholars that in order to ensure the social, economic and political viability of American central cities it will be necessary to address middle-income as well as low-income housing needs. The popularity of equity planning—with its focus on the most needy-implies, however, that these programmes would be so controversial that politicians would be reluctant to implement them. Case-studies of seven North American cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Montreal, New York, St Louis, St Paul and Wilmington) failed to support this hypothesis. Middle-income housing programmes have developed a strong constituency among community leaders and minority politicians who see these programmes playing an important role in neighbourhood revitalisation efforts. Although tax abatements and below market-rate mortgages are not reversing patterns of central-city decline, they are achieving more modest objectives such as encouraging banks to provide more loans in inner-city areas. The future expansion of these programmes will be dependent on changes at the federal level. At present, federal housing regulations and taxation policies hurt these efforts. For academics to play a more significant role in the development of these programmes, they will need to go beyond equity planning and recognise the need for a more comprehensive regeneration strategy including the maintenance of a solid middle-income population base.

In this paper we examine the potential of council tenants and private-sector renters in England to become owner-occupiers, using data from the 1988 General Household Survey (GHS). Methods pioneered by Littlewood in her analysis of data from the 1978 GHS are applied in this paper. A sensitivity analysis is also presented which shows the impact of different loan to income ratios on the ability of council and private-sector tenants to buy a dwelling. Finally, we consider the impact of the right to buy discounts on the ability of council tenants to buy their homes.

This article shows how regional differences in household formation relate to differences in income and housing prices. It presents an assessment of the effect of housing prices and income expectations on household formation decisions. Gender differences are revealed. Differences between spatial and temporal variation in headship rate changes are illustrated, along with the inappropriateness of using coefficients obtained through cross-sectional analysis in forecasting exercises or impact assessments. Normative conclusions are developed.

The intrametropolitan distribution of population and employment is a topic of considerable interest due to its implications for urban development. We develop an econometric model relating these distributions to a variety of factors. Using several unique explanatory variables and allowing for multiple suburban jurisdictions enable us to model better the spatial aspects of a metropolitan area. We find that housing cost and quality are the most important determinants of the population distribution, which is the most important determinant of the employment distribution; however, causation between population and employment runs both ways. Spatial factors, including transport infrastructure, play an important role in metropolitan development. The importance of various factors differs between manufacturing and non-manufacturing employment and between the white and non-white populations.

This paper empirically examines the factors that determine managers' remuneration in a sample of 97 UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The sample was partitioned into two groups, one comprising of 69 managers working for firms located in the South East (SE) economic planning region and the other comprising 28 managers working for firms located in 'other English regions' (OR). The average remuneration of managers located in the SE in the latter half of 1988 was £30 000 whilst for those located in the OR their remuneration was significantly less and averaged only £17 500 for the same period. Several wage equations were then estimated to determine if this difference in remuneration was due primarily to differences in the managers' human capital and/or employing-firm characteristics or whether, after con trolling for these factors, it was possible to detect a significant independent locational influence. The results indicate that both human capital (primarily the managers' age and qualifications) and firm/job-specific factors (their relative workloads, the size and growth of the firm in terms of assets) and the location of their employing firms were able to explain a large proportion of the variance in remuneration. Though the locational effect was statistically significant, after controlling for differences in human capital and job/firm-specific factors, the remuneration of the SE managers was estimated to be only some £3000 higher than that of managers located elsewhere in England.