Transition and Renewal: The Emergence of a Diverse Upstate Economy

During the 1900s, the U.S. transitioned from an economy based largely on manufacturing to one in which almost all jobs are in services. This transition has rearranged the economic fortunes of regions throughout the nation: Locations in the Sunbelt and on both coasts prospered in the 1970s as traditional manufacturing centers in the Midwest declined. But such “rust belt” states as Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan rebounded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the hemorrhage of manufacturing jobs abated and service-sector and finance jobs surged. While their recovery has not returned these states to the preeminence they enjoyed in the 1960s, it has disproved many forecasts of inevitable decline for the nation’s industrial heartland

Spatial Analysis: Development of Descriptive and Normative Methods with Applications to Economic-Ecological Modelling

This paper adapts Turing analysis and applies it to dynamic bioeconomic problems where the interaction of coupled economic and ecological dynamics over space endogenously creates (or destroys) spatial heterogeneity. It also extends Turing analysis to standard recursive optimal control frameworks in economic analysis and applies it to dynamic bioeconomic problems where the interaction of coupled economic and ecological dynamics under optimal control over space creates a challenge to analytical tractability. We show how an appropriate formulation of the problem reduces analysis to a tractable extension of linearization methods applied to the spatial analog of the well known costate/state dynamics. We illustrate the usefulness of our methods on bioeconomic applications, but the methods have more general economic applications where spatial considerations are important. We believe that the extension of Turing analysis and the theory associated with dispersion relationship to recursive infinite horizon optimal control settings is new.Spatial analysis, Economic-ecological modelling

The Dynamics of Growth and Distribution in a Spatially Heterogeneous World

This paper tries to reconcile growth and geographical economics by dealing directly with capital accumulation through time and space and by seeing growth convergence and spatial agglomeration as jointly generated by dynamic processes displaying pattern formation. It presents a centralized economy in which a Bergson-Samuelson- Millian central planner finds a flow of optimal distributions of consumption, subject to a spatial-temporal capital accumulation budget constraint. The main conclusions are: first, if the behavioral parameters are symmetric, but there is an asymmetric distribution of the capital stock, then the long run asymptotic distribution will be spatially homogeneous; second, if there is homogeneous distribution of the capital stock, but there is an asymmetric shock in any parameter, then the economy will converge towards a spatially heterogeneous asymptotic state; third, spatially heterogeneous asymptotic states will only emerge exogenously, not endogenously; fourth, the spatial propagation mechanism can give birth, when the production function is close to linear, to a Turing instability, which implies that for some parameter values, a conditionally stable spacetime distribution should display spatial pattern formation.Optimal growth and distribution; Spatial growth; Optimal control of partial differential equations; Traveling waves; Fourier transforms; Turing instability.

Optimal Control and Spatial Heterogeneity: Pattern Formation in Economic-Ecological Models

This paper extends Turing analysis to standard recursive optimal control frameworks in economics and applies it to dynamic bioeconomic problems where the interaction of coupled economic and ecological dynamics under optimal control over space creates (or destroys) spatial heterogeneity. We show how our approach reduces the analysis to a tractable extension of linearization methods applied to the spatial analog of the well known costate/state dynamics. We explicitly show the existence of a non-empty Turing space of diffusive instability by developing a linear-quadratic approximation of the original non-linear problem. We apply our method to a bioeconomic problem, but the method has more general economic applications where spatial considerations and pattern formation are important. We believe that the extension of Turing analysis and the theory associated with the dispersion relationship to recursive infinite horizon optimal control settings is new.Spatial analysis, Pattern formation, Turing mechanism, Turing space, Pontryagin’s principle, Bioeconomics