Metropolitan Governance Background Study : What Do We Need To Know ? A Rapid Foray Into Operational Concerns. Literature Review

This review focuses on metropolitan issues, not urban issues in general; but rather those problems that can best be tackled at a metropolitan scale to overcome the problems ascribed to jurisdictional fragmentation. Most metropolitan areas consist of a densely developed core city surrounded by suburbs that are engulfing smaller urban centers and villages, sprawling out into the rural areas along transportation routes, and sprouting industries, commercial activities and housing in a seemingly random fashion. They are usually made up of many local governments, often of wildly differing size, population and organizing capacity. A second focus of this paper is metropolitan decision-making for collective goods. Area wide decisions involve complex systems of actors, and a huge variety of actions. Collective goods and services are those enjoyed or used by the population at large: infrastructure, economic, social and cultural development facilities, and environmental protection. Also known as public goods, or joint consumption goods, these are needs that are “non-subtractable”, as everyone requires them. Roads and sewers are such an example. However, the interest is in more than equipment and services as such, it is in the ultimate outcomes of their presence: fluid traffic movements for instance, or high levels of public health. Following this line of enquiry, the third focus is an attempt to understand how the outcomes relate to, or are influenced by, metropolitan decision-making structures and processes. This is a most challenging task, since there are very few analytical attempts at the evaluation of results except on a programmatic basis. While there has been a fair number of comparative studies on a single service such as transportation or water supply, there are very few attempts to look in detail at overall outcomes

A Philosophically Plausible Formal Interpretation of Intuitionistic Logic

This study addresses the mediating role of settlement patterns in the relationship between urbanization and start-up activity. Places do not operate in a vacuum and to understand the effect of 'own' density on start-up patterns, we need to account for the urban spillovers or borrowed size that they may experience from other places nearby. The results can explain the empirical ambiguity in the relationship between urbanization and start-up patterns: the relationship between urbanization and start-up rates becomes more similar between countries when controlling for country-specific settlement patterns by including a spatially lagged urbanization variable and variables measuring the distance to urban centers. Accounting for the relative location of places and relevant sorting effects, we find that 'own' density has a consistently negative effect on start-up activity. Yet, access to other places has a generally positive effect. This implies that nearby regions profit from the advantages offered by urban environments without having to deal with the costs involved

Varieties of capitalism and resilience clusters: an exploratory approach to European regions

Regions around the world suffered asymmetric effects with the global economic crisis of the last decade. European regions were not different, and a myriad of impacts with varied magnitudes was felt. This article, inspired by the literature of varieties of capitalism (VoC), presents statistical and econometric evidence about the differences of regional resilience, measured by the variation of economic product, unemployment and R&D across regions in European Union during the economic downturn. An exploratory approach analyses the socio‐economic resilience between different member states, and VoC ideal‐types (liberal market economies, the continental capitalism, the social‐democrat economies, the Mediterranean capitalism, and the Eastern economies). The study presents a typology of resilience clusters in European regions. There were found six types of profiles concerning resilience: great performers, fast growth, intermediate position, R&D reduction, regions in divergence, and Mediterranean regions in big trouble. The study identifies key aspects for resilience, providing policy implications for regional economic policies. The comparison of the resilience clusters and the original VoC categorization has implications for this branch of literature as it does not completely address the variety of regional answers to the shocks.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Critiquing Construct Validity in World City Network Research: Moving from Office Location Networks to Inter-Organizational Projects in the Modeling of Intercity Business Flows

The interlocking world city network model and other office location approaches (OLAs) have become the most widely used empirical models of the world city network (WCN). Despite numerous methodological improvements, they continue to rely on a legacy of using data on office locations of firms to indirectly estimate intercity business flows. To advance the dialogue about how to improve on existing empirical models of the WCN, we examine the content, construct and structural validity of OLAs. We analyze the link between the theoretical construct of intercity business flows and network projections obtained from office location data and uncover evidence that calls into question the validity of OLAs as empirical models of the WCN. In the spirit of no deconstruction without reconstruction, we then develop an alternative empirical model of the WCN, based on directly observable relational ties among APS firms, which are formed through co-production of complex services. We call this the inter-organizational project approach (IOPA). We argue for IOPA's construct validity as an empirical model of the WCN and offer empirical evidence for its structural validity. We demonstrate it using a global sample of 161,114 investment bank syndicates in the 2000–2015 period

Reversal of economic fortunes: institutions and the changing ascendancy of Barcelona and Madrid as economic hubs

This paper looks at the divergent economic trajectories of Barcelona and Madrid since Spain's transition to democracy. It highlights how Barcelona, the city that was better positioned four decades ago to emerge as the main Spanish economic hub, has lost out to Madrid. We argue that the contrasting trajectories of the two cities have less to do with the pull of Madrid as the capital of Spain, with the development of new infrastructure in the country, or with agglomeration economies, and more with institutional factors. A growing societal divide in Barcelona along economic, social, and identity lines has led to a greater breakdown of trust and to the development of strong groups with limited capacity to bridge with one another than in Madrid. This has entailed the emergence of negative externalities that have limited the economic potential for growth in Barcelona and facilitated the rise of Madrid as the main economic hub within Spain

Urban sprawl and local fiscal burden: analysing the Spanish case

Urban sprawl is rapidly occurring in many Spanish urban areas. The objective of this paper is to evaluate how the trend of building dispersion of new residential areas may be affecting the fiscal stability of local Spanish governments. The high variability of the characteristics of Spanish urban areas as well as the existence of very similar local fiscal structures made this case particularly interesting. A precise index of urban sprawl, calculated with geo-referenced digital cartography, was used. Utilising spatially desegregated information of taxes from the Spanish National Institute for Fiscal Studies allowed for a measure of fiscal burden by local areas and the ability to distinguish among types of taxes. Control variables were also available at the local level from the Spanish Census and other databases. Quantile Regressions methodology supplementing Ordinary Least Square regressions assessed the discrepancy in the results and in the conclusions of the studied distributions. The results indicate that higher levels of urban sprawl imply higher local fiscal burden. This is especially clear in the higher part of the local fiscal burden distribution. By tax categories, the phenomenon of urban sprawl particularly affects local indirect taxation. Based on these results, local decision-makers should consider that urban planning is also a fundamental tool to assure long-term local fiscal stability