Roads as Channel of Centrifugal Policy Transfer. Spatial Interactions Model Revised

This paper proposes a methodology to measure spatial effects of roads and local authorities’ seats in a diffusion of business activity, which usually follows the distance decay patterns, from core to periphery. Regional development policy, pursued by regional authorities, directed to local units and designed to support local economies is implemented as a centrifugal diffusion process. This invisible flow of policy will be modeled with one-way spatial interaction model represented by multinomial distance-decay function on the integrated spatial dataset.

Can public intervention improve local public sector economic performance? The analysis of Special Economic Zones in Poland

Boosting the local economic growth and cohesion policy may be supported by using the public intervention. The local governments may benefit directly and indirectly from the place-based policy implemented as Special Economic Zones (SEZ). SEZ directly increase the employment and the number of firms, while, indirectly, they can raise the local public sector financial performance in the long run by increasing revenues from personal and corporate income taxes. This article assesses the efficiency of this policy at the local level in the context of an institutional environment and inter-agent local diffusion. It also uses the statistical methodology based on the comparison of the empirical density distributions of the economic and financial indicators within the institutional groups to detect the global shift or divergence or convergence patterns. This article examines the Polish experience of public intervention in 1995–2016 with 14 SEZ located in more than 350 different locations. It proves that in general, the financial and economic situation of the municipalities with SEZ did not improve. An institutional analysis of the SEZ operating conditions indicates that the weak operating requirements for SEZ firms together with a poor location cannot constitute a catalyst for local development

Roads as Channels of Centrifugal Policy Transfer: A Spatial Interaction Model Revised

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring the spatial effects of roads and the seats of local authorities on the diffusion of business activity, which usually follows distance decay patterns from core to periphery. Regional development policies, pursued by regional authorities, directed at local units and designed to support local economies, are implemented by means of a centrifugal diffusion process. This invisible flow of policy is modeled using a one-way spatial interaction model represented by a multinomial distance decay function for the integrated spatial dataset. The research results indicate that NUTS5 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) units (gminas) perform better in terms of saturation with business activity when NUTS4 seats of authority are established there than when they are established near international roads. The natural diffusion process from core cities to the periphery covers approximately 25–30 km, and the presence of international roads extends this range by 20 km. The results confirm the hypothesis of an endogenous growth pattern

Tourism as a Public Good – Local Government Perspective

Development of tourism should be based on common participation of local governments, enterprises and communities. Strong impulse for building and enlargement of infrastructure and tourism service was given by European funds, for which local governments and firms can apply. This support should be analyzed two-fold: subjective „who” and geographical „where” funds were used and what is their potential. The article presents spatial analysis of tourism development in Poland from the perspective of public sector

Spatial Interactions in Business and Housing Location Models

The paper combines theoretical models of housing and business locations and shows that they have the same determinants. It evidences that classical, behavioural, new economic geography, evolutionary and co-evolutionary frameworks apply simultaneously, and one should consider them jointly when explaining urban structure. We use quantitative tools in a theory-guided factors induction approach to show the complexity of location models. The paper discusses and measures spatial phenomena as distance-decaying gradients, spatial discontinuities, densities, spillovers, spatial interactions, agglomerations, and as multimodal processes. We illustrate the theoretical discussion with an empirical case of interacting point-patterns for business, housing, and population. The analysis reveals strong links between housing valuation and business location and profitability, accompanied by the related spatial phenomena. It also shows that assumptions concerning unimodal spatial urban structure, the existence of rational maximisers, distance-decaying externalities, and a single pattern of behaviour, do not hold. Instead, the reality entails consideration of multimodality, a mixture of maximisers and satisfiers, incomplete information, appearance of spatial interactions, feed-back loops, as well as the existence of persistence of behaviour, with slow and costly adjustments of location

Efficiency of Regional Public Investment: An NPV-Based Spatial Econometric Approach

<p>This paper develops a new methodology of spatial econometric modelling for regional public investment in local economies. The approach, based on the financial concept of net present value of cash flows, can be applied in the analysis of regional public investment with long-term financial inputs and outputs. With local public revenues related to spending in the model, one can observe economies of scale of investment with possible saturation effects and a marginal investment multiplier, explaining the extent to which public investment costs translate into public revenues. The main advantage of the proposed model is to behave counter-cyclically due to accumulation over the periods and to cover multi-period investments as well as postponed effects. This paper gives an example of public investment efficiency in Polish NUTS-5 municipalities regions.</p

Customer Churn in Retail E-Commerce Business: Spatial and Machine Learning Approach

This study is a comprehensive and modern approach to predict customer churn in the example of an e-commerce retail store operating in Brazil. Our approach consists of three stages in which we combine and use three different datasets: numerical data on orders, textual after-purchase reviews and socio-geo-demographic data from the census. At the pre-processing stage, we find topics from text reviews using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture and Gibbs sampling. In the spatial analysis, we apply DBSCAN to get rural/urban locations and analyse neighbourhoods of customers located with zip codes. At the modelling stage, we apply machine learning extreme gradient boosting and logistic regression. The quality of models is verified with area-under-curve and lift metrics. Explainable artificial intelligence represented with a permutation-based variable importance and a partial dependence profile help to discover the determinants of churn. We show that customers&rsquo; propensity to churn depends on: (i) payment value for the first order, number of items bought and shipping cost; (ii) categories of the products bought; (iii) demographic environment of the customer; and (iv) customer location. At the same time, customers&rsquo; propensity to churn is not influenced by: (i) population density in the customer&rsquo;s area and division into rural and urban areas; (ii) quantitative review of the first purchase; and (iii) qualitative review summarised as a topic

Non-Linear corrections in market method of patent valuation

Intellectual property rights are increasingly becoming an important asset of enterprises, so that an innovative business must carefully decide about the method of its valuation. The existing literature indicates three classical approaches to this issue: cost-based, income-based, and market-based methods, and a few more sophisticated ones such as: the option-based and patent citation methods, with their advantages and disadvantages. This paper proposes a novel methodology of non-linear corrections in the market model of patent valuation, when factors such as time to expiration, copying risk, or momentum in patent life cycle are taken into consideration. The proposed approach, based on evidence of the non-linear impact over time of the abovementioned factors on the value of patent, is anchored primarily in marketing science as well as in the theory and practice of accounting. This fine-tuning raises the accuracy and credibility of the market method of patent valuation