What Does the Future Hold? What Globalization Might Mean for the Rural South

This paper considers the implications of economic globalization for rural communities in the U.S. South. Despite significant gains in average incomes and educational attainment in the South over the past 30 years, the paper finds that the rural South\u27s longstanding reputation as the nation\u27s low-wage, low-skilled region remains largely intact. In particular, manufacturing wages in the rural South have remained stagnant relative to the rest of the United States. Furthermore, as dominant sectors such as textiles and apparel continue to experience price competition and international pressure, there will likely be additional downward pressure on wages in low-skill southern industries, and there may possibly be widespread job losses in the South\u27s rural communities

Thinking about Smart Cities: The Travels of a Policy Idea that Promises a Great Deal, but So Far Has Delivered Modest Results

This communication explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance–laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess “smart investments”, regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become “smart”. Keywords: urban development; smart city; sustainabilit

Evaluation of error across natural gas pipeline incidents

This paper demonstrates how qualitative analysis can be a novel means of investigating theories of error and causation in natural gas pipeline incidents. Qualitative analysis offers unique opportunities to understand process, interactions, and the role of context in identifying active error and latent conditions in incident causation. Through the coding of text from 24 onshore natural gas pipeline incident reports on leaks and explosions in the United States and Canada, our findings reveal a proportion of active and latent errors consistent with other hazardous infrastructure contexts (roughly 3:1 latent-active ratio across 817 coded errors). These findings underscore the robustness of extant error theory and support the argument for documenting multiple, connected causes of disaster in aggregate. Conclusions highlight the utility of in-depth case analyses and critique present pipeline incident database aggregation. Our interpretation provides a means to convey complex causation in aggregate form thus enabling more nuanced future qualitative and qualitative analyses

Restructuring Appalachian Manufacturing in 1963-1992: The Role of Branch Plants

This paper uses the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD),a unique, detailed, plant-level database that covers the entire U.S. manufacturing sector in five-year intervals to examine how the manufacturing sector in Appalachia has evolved over the past thirty years (from 1963 to 1992). The research focuses on three questions:1) Is the Appalachian Region attracting new manufacturing plants at the same rate as the rest of the country? 2) Does Appalachian manufacturing employment exhibit low wage, low productivity characteristics, compared with the rest of the country? 3) Is Appalachia still heavily reliant on branch plants? The results show the manufacturing base of Appalachia in 1992 looks very much the same as it did in 1967. Compared to the rest of the country, Appalachian manufacturing is still more reliant on branch plants and is characterized by lower wage and lower productivity establishments. This result is not due to a lack of entry-manufacturing plant entry rates and manufacturing job formation associated with entrants in Appalachia are only slightly lower than for the U.S. as a whole. Job destruction rates caused by exits are actually lower than in the U.S. as a whole. Copyright 2001 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

Urbanization and Income Inequality in Post-Reform China: A Causal Analysis Based on Time Series Data

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This paper investigates the potential causal relationship(s) between China's urbanization and income inequality since the start of the economic reform. Based on the economic theory of urbanization and income distribution, we analyze the annual time series of China's urbanization rate and Gini index from 1978 to 2014. The results show that urbanization has an immediate alleviating effect on income inequality, as indicated by the negative relationship between the two time series at the same year (lag = 0). However, urbanization also seems to have a lagged aggravating effect on income inequality, as indicated by positive relationship between urbanization and the Gini index series at lag 1. Although the link between urbanization and income inequality is not surprising, the lagged aggravating effect of urbanization on the Gini index challenges the popular belief that urbanization in post-reform China generally helps reduce income inequality. At deeper levels, our results suggest an urgent need to focus on the social dimension of urbanization as China transitions to the next stage of modernization. Comprehensive social reforms must be prioritized to avoid a long-term economic dichotomy and permanent social segregation

Regional foundations of energy transitions

Abstract Due to a spatial turn in the socio-technical transition literature, the geography of energy transitions has recently been taken increasingly seriously, leading to burgeoning research output on regional energy transitions since early 2010. Amidst this wealth of publications, however, it can be difficult to keep track of its diverse and constantly evolving landscape. This editorial therefore aims at developing a framework that allows for bringing multiple approaches to regional energy transitions into conversation with each other and that helps to understand and explain the complexity of these interdependencies in ways that go beyond observing regional variety in energy transitions

PTSI Final Report: Transforming the Psychological Health System of Care in the US Military

This material is based on research sponsored by the USAMRMC (under the cooperative agreement number W81 XWH 12-2-0016) and a consortium of other government and industry members. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the USAMRMC, the U.S. Government, or other consortium members.Department of Defens

Urbanization and Income Inequality in Post-Reform China: A Causal Analysis Based on Time Series Data

<div><p>This paper investigates the potential causal relationship(s) between China’s urbanization and income inequality since the start of the economic reform. Based on the economic theory of urbanization and income distribution, we analyze the annual time series of China’s urbanization rate and Gini index from 1978 to 2014. The results show that urbanization has an immediate alleviating effect on income inequality, as indicated by the negative relationship between the two time series at the same year (lag = 0). However, urbanization also seems to have a lagged aggravating effect on income inequality, as indicated by positive relationship between urbanization and the Gini index series at lag 1. Although the link between urbanization and income inequality is not surprising, the lagged aggravating effect of urbanization on the Gini index challenges the popular belief that urbanization in post-reform China generally helps reduce income inequality. At deeper levels, our results suggest an urgent need to focus on the social dimension of urbanization as China transitions to the next stage of modernization. Comprehensive social reforms must be prioritized to avoid a long-term economic dichotomy and permanent social segregation.</p></div