Daoqin TONG

David PLANE

Jaewon LIM

Sandy DALL’ERBA

English

Research Papers in Economics

__________________ Région et Développement n° 33-2011 ___________________ 
 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
NEW PERSPECTIVES  
ON REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 
 
Sandy DALL’ERBA
1, Jaewon LIM
2,  
Daoqin TONG
3, David PLANE
4 
 
 
 
 
The bailout of Greece and the rescue packages many industrialized coun-
tries have implemented following the current economic crisis bring to the fore 
many questions that constitute the bread-and-butter of the regional scientist: 
Why does a country/a region persistently lag behind? Should national/supra-
national governments come to the rescue of the most distressed areas? If so, 
what criteria are used to define those worthy of being rescued from the others? 
How are the recipient areas going to use the money? Will it promote local de-
velopment only or will it spillover to other areas, etc. While the goal of this 
special issue of Région et Développement is not to provide specific answers to 
the current economic crisis nor the bailout of Greece, it proposes a unique view 
of the current state of what urban and regional scientists can do when uncover-
ing the origin of territorial imbalances of development, accounting for spatial 
dependences across places and drawing recommendations for dissemination in 
the policy arena. As such, most of the articles you will find here rely on state-
of-the-art techniques that have flourished over the years in the field of regional 
science.  
 
This special issue is composed of nine papers that could be classified in 
five parts. The first article is concerned with the identification of a region’s 
fundamental economic structure. The second and third papers focus on estimat-
ing  regional  convergence  at  different  spatial  scales:  within  an  economically 
integrated block and within Canada. Those are followed by two papers that 
demonstrate how education plays an important role in explaining regional dis-
parities both within Italy and Peru. The sixth and seventh contributions are in-
terested in the factors at the origin of uneven distribution in employment growth 
                                                           
1 The University of Arizona, School Geography and Development, Tucson, USA ; 
Mail : dallerba@email.arizona.edu 
2 The University of Arizona, Office of University Research Parks, School Geography and De -
velopment, Tucson, USA ; Mail : jlim@email.arizona.edu 
3 The University of Arizona, School Geography and Development, Tucson, USA ; 
Mail : daoqin@email.arizona.edu 
4 The University of Arizona, School Geography and Development, Tucson, USA ; 
Mail : plane@email.arizona.edu 6  Introduction 
within  various  US  metropolitan  areas  and  across  the  Appalachian  counties    
respectively. The next piece that deals with uncovering the factors at the origin 
of manufacturing location decision in Indonesia. Finally, the last contribution is 
a research note aiming at developing better measurements of business incuba-
tors’ performance. Further details on all the contributions are below. 
 
The paper by Sudhir Thakur focuses on the link between regional eco-
nomic  development  and  structural  change.  As  economic  development  takes 
place  the  strength  and  direction  of  intersectoral  relationships  change,  which 
leads  to shifts  in the importance,  direction and interaction among  economic 
sectors. As such, the identification of a region’s fundamental economic struc-
ture is necessary as it leads to an improved understanding of the space-time 
evolution of regional economic activities. This paper not only reviews the dif-
ferent techniques used to study structural change analysis, but provide also a 
methodology to identify the fundamental economic structure of a region.  
 
The paper by Florence Bouvet contributes to the debate on economic in-
tegration  and  regional  convergence.  Focusing  on  four  economic  integration 
systems, namely the United States, the European Economic and Monetary Un-
ion, the European Union, and the North-American Free Trade Agreement, the 
paper shows that interregional income inequality is negatively related with the 
level of economic integration. Further analysis uncovers the extent to which 
inequality is higher in poor regions, which confirms Kuznet’s inverted U rela-
tionship between economic development (measured by the level of per capita 
income) and regional income inequality.  
 
The work by Pierre-Marcel Desjardins investigates whether regional 
disparities in Canada are interprovincial or urban/rural in nature. In particular, 
the paper focuses on regional disparities in population growth, income, labor 
force participation rate, employment rate and population without a high school 
degree in Canada between 2001 and 2006. Results indicate that urban/rural dis-
parities dominate interprovincial disparities in explaining regional disparities in 
Canada.   
 
The  next  set  of  papers  focus  on  the  role  of  human  capital.  Luisa 
Gagliardi and Marco Percoco take a fresh look at one of the most studied, 
classic cases of regional economic disparities: the longstanding development 
gap between the North and South of Italy. Their long-run (1891–1951 time-
span) econometric modeling deploys a new panel data set to provide evidence 
that the higher human capital stock in the North provided the prerequisites for 
early industrialization. Furthermore, they conclude that policies protecting agri-
culture resulted in an incentive for the South to specialize further in the primary 
sector, which hindered development over the longer term. Their work is fol-
lowed by the paper of Maribel Elias and Sergio Rey, which demonstrates that 
social  indicators  should  be  used  in  addition  to  economic  indicators  when  it 
comes to examining regional inequality and its dynamics in a developing coun-
try. Spatial econometric regressions indicate the presence of significant spillo-
ver effects and convergence in education and in socioeconomic levels across 
Peruvian provinces over 1993–2005.                                                                            Région et Développement    7 
The following two contributions are mostly interested in the origins of 
employment growth differentials. As such, the paper by Bumsoo Lee and Peter 
Gordon investigates the impact of the spatial structure of an urban area (de-
fined by dispersion and polycentricity) on employment growth, net new busi-
ness formation and “industrial churn”. While the authors’ previous work re-
vealed that in the 1990s more clustering in small metros and more dispersion in 
large metros were associated with faster employment growth, their current con-
tribution is based on the 2000s data. Though ordinary least squares regression 
failed to validate a similar pattern, locally weighted regressions are able to con-
firm the links between spatial structure and urban growth found in the earlier 
paper.  In  the  following  paper,  G.  Gebremariam,  T.  Gebremedhin,  P. 
Schaeffer, R. Jackson and T. Phipps develop and estimate a spatial equilibri-
um model of employment growth across the Appalachian counties for 1990–
2000. Besides the existence of spatial spillover effects, the results suggest that 
agglomerative effects that arise from the demand and the supply side contribute 
to employment growth. Based on these findings, they recommend counties and 
communities to cooperate to design policies that support employment growth 
and/or attract people with high endowments of human capital and high income. 
 
The contribution of Andi Irawan deals with the spatial distribution of 
large and medium manufacturing industries in Indonesia’s East Java Provinces. 
More precisely, it investigates the degree of localization and co-localization, the 
randomness of the observed localization, and the industrial structure of several 
cities. His results reveal that differences in technology and scale economies are 
significant determinants in the localization process of industries. In addition, he 
finds evidence of agglomeration spillovers by applying the notion of neighbor-
hood effects in the frame of a spatial econometric model. 
 
This is followed by the research note of Shaoming Cheng and Peter 
Schaeffer, which argues that existing performance measures to gauge the effec-
tiveness of business incubators suffer from numerous limitations and are often 
biased, underestimating their effect on entrepreneurship and economic devel-
opment in distressed areas. Two approaches for developing more theoretically 
grounded measures are explored, one based on quasi-experimental “matching” 
procedures and the other on input-output derived “relative contributions”.  
 
Putting together this special issue was not solely the work of the guest ed-
itors. We are thankful to Michel Dimou, one of the full-time editors of Région 
et Développement, for suggesting us to work on this special issue, the plan for 
which came together at the 2009 WRSA conference. We have appreciated the 
strong support he gave us since then. Finally, we extend our special thanks to 
the members of the Comité de Rédaction of Région et Développement and all 
the  persons  who  volunteered  their  time  and  provided  us  with  the  necessary 
feedbacks to improve the quality of this issue
5.  
                                                           
5 As such, our special thanks go, in alphabetical order, to Florence Bouvet (Sonoma State Univer-
sity,  USA),  Andrew  Cassey  (Washington  State  University,  USA),  Pierre-Marcel  Desjardins 
(Université de Moncton, Canada), Gebremeskel Gebremariam (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and 
State University, USA), Carolyn D. Guo (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 8  Introduction 
Last but not least, we would like to use this opportunity to dedicate this 
special issue to Professor Lay James Gibson, and we hope it will come as a 
surprise to him. Being edited by a quartet of current regional scientists at the 
University of Arizona in Tucson, this issue reflects the “Arizona School” of 
regional development, which owes a substantial portion of its intellectual herit-
age to his longtime leadership and promotional efforts on behalf of the field. 
Lay's applied geographic studies on issues of local economic development have 
played a major role in building Arizona's international reputation. His entrepre-
neurship and leadership in promoting "regional development" as a Bachelor of 
Science major field of study resulted in our undergraduate geography program 
developing into the second largest in the United States. For decades Lay has 
traveled the globe, ceaselessly promoting the cross-cultural collegiality and the 
multidisciplinary perspectives that have come to be such distinguishing attrib-
utes of the spirit of regional science.  As one of the early Presidents of the Re-
gional  Science  Association  International  (RSAI),  and  as  longtime  Executive 
Secretary of the Western Regional Science Association (WRSA), Lay has fos-
tered numerous collaborative ventures – both intellectual and social – with the 
French-speaking regional science community of scholars. We thus take enor-
mous  pride  and  pleasure  in  dedicating  this  special  issue  of  Région  et  Dé-
veloppement, which was born during discussions at the 2009 Presidential Re-
ception at WRSA, to Professor Gibson. So, with a clink of our wine glasses: 
Santé, Lay! 
 
                                                                                                                                              
Austria),  Andi  Irawan  (University  of  Illinois  at  Urbana-Champaign,  USA),  Andrew  Isserman 
(University  of  Illinois  at  Urbana-Champaign,  USA),  Michael  Keane  (National  University  of 
Ireland, Galway, Ireland), Michael Lahr (Rutgers University, USA), Bumsoo Lee (University of 
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), Marco Millones (Clark University, USA), Daisuke Naka-
mura (Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile), Suahasil Nazara (University of Indonesia, Indone-
sia), John Parr (University of Glasgow, the UK), Roberto Patuelli (University of Lugano, Switzer-
land), Marco Percoco (Bocconi University, Italy), Maria Plotnikova (Henley University of Read-
ing, the UK), Peter Schaeffer (West Virginia University USA), Norbert Schanne (Institute for 
Employment Research, Germany), Jungyul Sohn (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea), 
Jean-François Tremblay (University of Ottawa, Canada).   

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT : INTRODUCTION

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT : INTRODUCTION

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