The relationship between economic development and business ownership revisited

This paper revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers (2002) where deviations from the 'equilibrium' rate of business ownership play a central role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economic development. Two extensions of the original setup are addressed: using longer time series of averaged data of 23 OECD countries (up to 2004) we can discriminate between different functional forms of the 'equilibrium' rate and we allow for different penalties for being above or under the 'equilibrium' rate. The additional data do not provide evidence of a superior statistical fit of a U-shaped 'equilibrium' relationship when compared to an L-shaped one. There appears to be a growth penalty for having too few business owners but not so for having too many.

Programma beheer : leren van omliggende landen

De EU schrijft voor dat regelingen voor agrarisch natuurbeheer geëvalueerd worden op effectiviteit en efficiëntie, maar schrijft geen methodiek voor. Dit artikel vergelijkt de situatie in Engeland, Noordrijn-Westfalen, Vlaanderen, Frankrijk en Denemarken met die van Nederland. Daarbij ligt de nadruk op de vraag in hoeverre regelingen centraal dan wel decentraal worden aangestuur

Plannen over de grenzen heen. Een vakgebied in wording op het Internationale Stedenbouwcongres van 1924

In the summer of 1924 close to 500 people from 28 different countries visited Amsterdam in order to into immerse themselves in the town planning challenges of their day. Dividing lines separating national developments were transcended in substantive discussions about an emerging discipline. At that time, urbanization was generally perceived as a rapid, autonomous and disastrous process that resulted in unmanageable metropolises with a rapidly declining quality of life. During the conference, special attention was paid to ideas on regional planning: plans that spanned municipal and provincial borders and called for an interdisciplinary approach. This article focuses on the content of the debate on 3 and 4 July 1924. The papers, or ‘preliminary reports’, that preceded the conference have received a fair amount of attention, but it is the substance and atmosphere of the discussions themselves that reveal the openness and collegiality of the international exchange of knowledge. The conference in Amsterdam was no isolated event: an international urban movement, or ‘Urban Internationale’, had been developing in the background since 1910. Various Dutch and foreign organizations were part of a broad international network engaged with the issue of urbanization. Many well-known foreign experts attended the 1924 conference; as such it could be seen as a point of intersection in the multi-dimensional network. The debate covered such topics as housing, traffic problems, conflicting interests, land policy and public green space inside and outside the city. The main topic in 1924 was the possibility of tackling urbanization and ecological issues across administrative and disciplinary borders. At the time, regional planning was a relatively new concept in the Netherlands; the inspiration for such plans came primarily from England, Germany, France, Belgium and the United States. A second and even bigger conference in Amsterdam took place in 1938: the International Geographical Congress, with some 1200 participants from 36 countries. Participants in the relatively small Landscape section of this congress considered to what extent the resolutions of 1924 were reflected in Dutch practice. It transpired that in the intervening years many regional plans had been drawn up and the evaluation of interdisciplinary practical experiences had highlighted numerous difficulties that were still topical. The 1924 town planning conference appears to have been a unique occasion during which multiple urban movements collaborated and in so doing reached a broad audience of town planners, architects, engineers and above all (Dutch) administrators. The involvement of the last group led to a pre-war upsurge in regional plans. As far as the Netherlands was concerned, the 1924 conference can be regarded as the starting point of the rich tradition of regional planning, and perhaps even as the germ of post-war spatial national planning

Het stapelen van ruimtelijke informatie: Enkele gedachten over het structureren in lagen en de oorsprong ervan

Understood as a conceptual tool for the manage­ment of information, layers are ubiquitous in our days. In computer graphics, they are a standard, basic feature: image editors for still or motion pic­tures, computer­assisted drawing (CAD) pro­grams, and of course geospatial information sys­tems (GIS) – as well as most of their user­oriented applications –, all of them use layers in one way or another, often in so essential a manner that they constitute their very raison d’être. As a conse­quence, the catchy word layering that so much pervades current architectural practice seems to designate something that everyone knows, a procedure that is practically taken for granted and yet has given rise to comparatively little research. In relation to architectural design, this may be par­ticularly baffling, considering that layering has provided the backbone for singular projects that have become a methodological breakthrough and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for subse­quent practice – one needs only to think of Kool­haas’ influential proposal for Parc de la Villette, Eisenman’s recurrent lucubrations, or the recent Serpentine pavilion by Herzog de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.Layers of ‘lagen’, opgevat als een begripsinstru­ment voor het beheer van informatie, zijn in onze tijd alomtegenwoordig. Ze zijn een primair en vast kenmerk van computergraphics: beeldbewerkings­programma’s voor stilstaande of bewegende beel­den, digitale tekenprogramma’s (CAD) en natuur­lijk geografische informatiesystemen (GIS) en de meeste van hun gebruiksgerichte applicaties, ze maken allemaal op de een of andere manier gebruik van gelaagde informatie, en vaak zijn die lagen er zo’n wezenlijk bestanddeel van dat ze hun raison d’être zelf vormen. De kreet layering, die in de huidige architectuurpraktijk zo wijdverbreid is, lijkt als gevolg daarvan te slaan op iets wat ieder­een kent, een procedé dat nagenoeg als vanzelf­sprekend wordt aangenomen en toch maar relatief weinig is onderzocht. Dat laatste is bij uitstek ver­bazingwekkend in de context van het architec­tuurontwerp, als we bedenken dat het structure­ren in lagen heeft gefungeerd als de ruggengraat van uitzonderlijke ontwerpen die gelden als een methodologische doorbraak en onuitputtelijke bron van inspiratie voor volgende generaties: denk alleen maar aan het invloedrijke voorstel van Rem Koolhaas voor Parc de la Villette, Eisenmans tech­nische hoogstandjes of het recente Serpentine Gallery Pavilion van Herzog & de Meuron en Ai Weiwei

Venture Lab: de motor voor regionale innovaties, Welke kansen bieden ze voor Greenport Venlo?

Helpdeskvraag om een quick scan uit te voeren naar het concept Venture Labs en hoe dit gebruikt kan worden om regionale innovaties op het gebied van agribusiness, logisitiek, C2C en kwaliteit leefomgeving in Greenport Venlo te bewerkstelligen. Een Venture Lab is over het algemeen een technologisch centrum dat ondersteuning biedt aan startende ondernemers, wetenschappers, PhD’s en studenten die een patent of techniek willen commercialiseren in een onderneming. Een Venture Lab is te omschrijven als een gebouw, maar het is meer dan dat. Het is tevens een onderwijsprogramma, waarin op een gestructureerde manier een onderneming opgezet kan worden. Deelnemers aan het Venture Lab programma hebben meestal een eigen idee en willen dat graag vermarkten. Het hebben van een idee is echter meestal niet noodzakelijk

Pieter Bakker Schut (1877-1952), manager in stedenbouw

It is impossible to study the history of Dutch public housing and urban planning in the twentieth century without repeatedly coming across the name Pieter Bakker Schut. From 1904 onwards, he was chairman of the Sociaal-Technische Vereeniging van Democratische Ingenieurs en Architecten (STV, Social-Technical Society of Democratic Engineers and Architects) and from 1918 a member of the board of the Nederlands Instituut voor Volkshuisvesting (NIV, Netherlands Institute of Housing). In that same year he was appointed director of the Dienst Stadsontwikkeling en Volkshuisvesting (DSV, Department of Urban Planning and Public Housing) in The Hague. In this capacity he was directly involved in the problems of this, by Dutch standards, big city, which was also the fastest growing city in the Randstad urban cluster in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike many of his contemporary directors of municipal urban planning departments, he was neither a designer nor an academic. His career unfolded at the interface between practical work and the systematization and professionalization of urban planning as an autonomous discipline. His role in this period of transition was one of directing and inspiring. As such, Bakker Schut’s main significance for Dutch urban planning lies in what much later came to be regarded as a form of management. In effect, he anticipated a way of working that only gradually became common practice in Dutch urban planning after the Second World War. Recent decades have seen the publication of detailed studies of several urban planners and researchers, such as the biographies of T.K. Van Lohuizen (Arnold van der Valk, 1990), C. van Eesteren (Vincent van Rossem, 1993) and W.G. Witteveen (Noor Mens, 2007). Although more than one publication mentions Pieter Bakker Schut as an influential figure, he has never been the focus of a study. Despite his forward-looking approach, Bakker Schut’s influence on Dutch urban planning has yet to receive the attention it deserves. This article examines Bakker Schut’s career as a manager in urban planning. The emphasis is on the positions he held in the aforementioned bodies and his contributions to the main themes of the Woningwet (National Housing Act): public housing (1901), urban planning (1921) and regional planning (1931). The aim of this biographical sketch is to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the evolution of Dutch urban planning, and at the same time provide the initial impetus for further research into Bakker Schut. It is at any rate clear from this sketch that his extensive body of work and the offices he held during his career merit such a study. So too the career and work of his son, Frits Bakker Schut, who continued in his father’s footsteps and has likewise yet to be the subject of a study