Regions in International Trade

The book provides a comprehensive approach to the assessment of the nature of exporting activity, combining well-established theoretical reasoning with empirical evidence, and also signalling important economic policy recommendations. It is suitable for a wide range of recipients ranging from scholars and students to policy-makers or local/regional authorities engaged in the process of designing/implementing regional policies

Self-driving tourism induced carbon emission flows and its determinants in well-developed regions: A case study of Jiangsu Province, China

Carbon emissions from the tourism industry are an important measure of the impact tourism has on the environment. Previous studies are predominantly focused on the static estimation of carbon emission from tourism transport. The effective estimation and analysis of carbon emission flows from self-driving tourism, and it’s related determinants, has become increasingly important. Using expressway traffic flow data at the level of toll-gate across Jiangsu Province in China, 2014, this paper has estimated the carbon emission flows from self-driving tourism between counties, analyzed the spatial patterns of its inflow, outflow and net flows, and modelled the determinants of these flows globally and locally using the geographically weighted regression method. The spatial distribution of these flows show high concentration in the South, gradually decreasing to the North. The two geographically weighted regression models demonstrate that the determinants of both inflows (the per capita gross domestic product. and the scenic spot’s score) and outflows (the per capita and total population of permanent residents) indicate spatial non-stationarity across Jiangsu province. The flow perspective and geographically weighted regression methods used in this paper have been proven to be effective in theoretical understanding and methodogical analysis of carbon emission trading. It is concluded that the spatial variation of these determinants has provided important evidence for carbon emission trading at county level. This suggests that local governments should take the variations of per capita gross domestic product, score of attractive spots and total population of permanent residents into the process of estimating carbon emission trading between counties

Migrants and firms : evidence from China

This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employment expands. Labor productivity decreases sharply and remains low in the medium run. A quantitative framework suggests that destinations become too labor-abundant and migration mostly benefits lowproductivity firms within locations. As migrants select into high-productivity destinations, migration however strongly contributes to the equalization of factor productivity across locations

What Influences Family Migration Decision of China’s New Generation Rural-urban Migrants? A Multilevel Logistic Regression Analysis

The massive scale of new-generation rural-urban migrants in China has attracted extensive scholarly attention in recent years. While previous studies on China’s rural migrant workers focus on migrants’ individual settlement intentions, migrant’s family migration decision-making and the intergenerational differences between the old-generation migrants and new-generation migrants are underexplored. Based on the data of 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this paper adopts a multilevel logistic regression approach to explore family and destination factors influencing family migration decision of China’s new generation rural migrant workers. The empirical results reveal that both the migrants’ family and destination attributes significantly influence their family migration decision. The demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of family have been pivotal factors underlying family migration decision of China’s new generation rural-urban migrants, while 16.9% of the chances is explained by between-destination differences. Self-employed migrants with housing properties in host cities, long migration duration and high-income level are more likely to migrate with their family members. Yet, the possibility of family migration is found to be significantly and negatively correlated with the age, education level, number of children and inter-provincial mobility of the new generation migrant workers. In addition, new generation rural-urban migrants’ family migration is more likely to be found in cities with service-oriented industry structure, better environmental quality, and higher hukou barriers which is possibly related to more job opportunities. These research findings not only complement the existing literature on China’s new generation rural-urban migrants, but also have important policy implications for reforming hukou system and enhancing social integration of rural-to-urban migrant population

Mekong Basin Focal Project: Synthesis report

The Mekong Basin Focal Project aims were to assess water use, water productivity and water poverty in the basin, and analyse the opportunities and risks of change in water management that influences water poverty. The main issue facing the Lower Mekong is not water availability (except for seasonally in certain areas such as northeast Thailand) but the impact of changed flows (which may result from dam or irrigation development or climate change) on ecology, fish production, access to water and food security. Poverty is generally decreasing in the Mekong, but the poorer people are not sharing in the improvements. Water governance and sharing of benefits is a key challenge for the Mekong

Investigating the introduction of economic land use developments to create rail contra-flow using a strategic model: a case study of Johannesburg

South Africa is still recovering from the effects of the apartheid government and spatial design that marginalises the demographic that resides at the edges and outskirts of cities. The country has come a long way from where it was, but still has a long way to go to eradicate the effects this fragmentation has had on access to socio economic opportunities. Diversifying land use and creating localised economic hubs may provide a helping hand in reducing the need to travel far distances to seek opportunity, and by extension create an attraction for surrounding communities. The dual role of nullifying past prejudice implemented through strategic spatial design while introducing the perspective of using the relationship between land use and transport to create rail contra flow and localised socio-economic hubs is one that can be achieved strategically. The modelling software that will help to demonstrate the model output of the research, which will be a simulation of contra-flow after the introduction of economic land use developments, is PTV VISUM