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Part 2: How Do We Compare? Hampton Roads Versus Other Regions, Regional Studies Institute, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

Per capita income in Hampton Roads has been rising and, after we factor in the cost of living, now is about 6 percent above the national average. This is a startling reversal from the late 1990s when the region was well below the national average. Housing prices here continue to be lower than the national average, as is our overall cost of living. Our air is cleaner than the national average and we rate high in terms of cultural amenities, but founder with regard to several measures of educational attainment.

Organizing In The Garment Industry In Mexico: Implications For New Social Movement Theory, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

This paper examines attempts to improve workers' rights in the Maquila Industry in Mexico by using two case studies. It analyzes the struggles that recently occurred at the Kukdong and Duro plants. The underlying question of the research is how to balance the co-existence of market economies with effective means to ensure adequate conditions for workers, and most importantly, ensuring their right to freedom of association. Under recent forms of global economic restructuring, the state is often unwilling or unable to uphold workers' rights. To combat the present form of corporate-driven global capitalism, workers in the South, in solidarity with …

Developing Integrated Object-Oriented Conception Of Geomarketing As A Tool For Promotion Of Regional Sustainable Development: The Case Study Of Ukraine, Volodymyr M. Anderson

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

In the paper we propose and discuss new vision of geomarketing as a tool for promotion of regional sustainable development. Integrated object-oriented conception of geomarketing was designed by adoption and elaboration of some new ideas and approaches, such as “place marketing”, “non-profit marketing”, “counter-marketing”, “collaborative spatial decision-making”, “endogenous regional development”, “regional sustainable development”, “public-private partnership”. We explore how geomarketing in such a comprehension may be implemented in business and public administration, regional development policy making on example of some Ukrainian firms, regional governments, and communities. The proposed geomarketing conception is based on integration of three different interpretations of geomarketing: 1) …

Non-Linear Input-Output Models: Practicability And Potential, Guy R. West, Randall Jackson

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

The conventional input-output model has been widely criticised, both justly and unjustly, for its limiting assumptions. One of these assumptions is homogeneity of degree one. This paper explores some approaches to minimise this limitation of traditional input-output analysis by removing the assumption of linear coefficients for the intermediate and household sectors. As is well documented in the literature, the household sector is the dominant component of multiplier effects in an input-output model, so using marginal income and expenditure coefficients for the household sector provides a more accurate estimate of the multiplier effects. A price model can then utilised to estimate …

An Economic Impact Study Of The Pennsylvania Section Of The Cove Point Expansion, Randall Jackson, Walter R. Schwarm

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

Dominion Resources, Inc. engaged the Regional Research Institute to determine the total economic impacts associated with pipeline construction and/or modernization proposals traversing several Pennsylvania jurisdictions. The proposed project represents an investment of approximately $200 million. The scope of this analysis consists of estimating varying economic effects including job creation and resulting personal income, output and fiscal or tax revenue impacts directly associated with both the operational and construction phases of the proposed Pipeline expansion project. We calculate the spill-over or multiplicative impacts that will arise from the proposed Pipeline project. Additionally, some attempt is made in this analysis to capture …

Manufacturing Industry Cluster And High-Technology Industry Analysis Of Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area, Ergun Meric

Masters Culminating Experiences (1993-2011)

The aim of this study is to analyze the competitiveness of the Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area manufacturing cluster and I evaluate the region's high tech capacity.

Cluster analysis is an important tool which is widely used by regional economists to assist firms and local governments in their decision making process and development strategies.

In the first section of this study, the theoretical framework of cluster analysis is explained by referring to authors who contributed to the development of the concept in recent years. Location quotient analysis is used to compare the region's capability with other MSAs and nationwide. By using …

The Cost Of Getting Books Read In Rural Africa: Estimates From A Survey Of Library Use In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane

Economics

Dim Delobsom was one of the first indigenous colonial bureaucrats in the French administration of Upper Volta. Born in 1897, he rapidly rose through the ranks of colonial administration, becoming a high-level functionary. He also served as the resident anthropologist of the dominant Mossi tribe of Upper Volta, and published numerous books and articles on Mossi customs. Delobsom fell afoul of an important faction of the colonial apparatus, however, when he decided to assume the chieftaincy of his natal village upon his father's death. Colonial officials and French Catholic priests thought he would be compromised as a bureaucrat-chief, and sought …

Data Users Conference_2004, University Of New Mexico Bureau Of Business And Economic Research, New Mexico Economic Development Department

Historic Publications

DATA USERS CONFERENCE.

Futures Thinking To Achieve Sustainable Development At Local Level In Ireland, Lorcan Sirr, Ruth Kelly, John Ratcliffe

Reports

We are living in times of unprecedented global change and upheaval and over the next ten to 20 years governments, organisations and individuals will face increasing difficulties in an environment of growing complexity, heightened uncertainty and a quickening pace of change. The concept of sustainable development implies the reconciliation of long-term socio-economic development, environmental protection and quality of life; essentially it is concerned with the future. Unfortunately, the potential for linking “futures thinking” to debates about sustainable development at local and regional government levels is relatively undeveloped, particularly in Ireland. Responding to this challenge, The Futures Academy at Technological University …

Using Information And Communication Technology For Human Development: Comparing Strategies, Jenny Engelbrektsson

Theses : Honours

In the last 20 years, applications of lnformation and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have impacted on the economics of the industrialised world. In today's "information society", information and knowledge are essential to social and economic development. However, not everyone has access to ICI sand the information they may provide. There is concern that existing inequities of income, knowledge, skills and measures of social development may increase as a result of a growing "digital divide" both between and within countries. There is an ongoing discussion within the international community about whether ICTs may play a significant role in human development. This study …

Measurement Of The Ocean And Coastal Economy: Theory And Methods, Charles S. Colgan

Publications

This paper supplements reports and data released on the coastal and ocean economy of the United States by the National Ocean Economics Project. It provides a discussion of the relevant literature involved in the investigation of the ocean and coastal related economy, the theoretical background of measures such as gross domestic and gross state product, and provides details on sources, methods, assumptions, and limitations of the data provided by NOEP.

The Influence Of Policies On Trade And Foreign Direct Investment, G. Nicoletti, Stephen S. Golub, D. Hajkova, D. Mirza, K.-Y. Yoo

Economics Faculty Works

This paper assesses the importance of border and non‐border policies for global economic integration. The focus is on four widely‐advocated policies: removing explicit restrictions to trade and FDI; promoting domestic competition; improving the adaptability of labour markets; and ensuring adequate levels of infrastructure capital. The analysis covers FDI and trade in both goods and services, thus aiming to account for the most important channels of globalisation and dealing with most modes of cross‐border services supply. The results highlight that, despite extensive liberalisation over the past two decades, there is scope for further reducing policy barriers to integration of OECD markets. …

The Virgin And The Grasshoppers: Persistence And Piety In German-Catholic America, Stephen Gross

Faculty Working Papers

This paper examines two inter-related historical problems -- the impact of the market revolution in nineteenth-century American and the disruptive impact of immigration on community life -- by chronicling the construction of a votive chapel in the heavily German-Catholic Stearns County, Minnesota. The chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was ostensibly built to secure divine relief from a plague of Rocky Mountain locusts that was devastating the area. At the same time, the chapel and the rituals surrounding its construction spoke to other community needs and functioned in diverse ways to address other community problems. For one, the shrine spoke …

Benchmarking Study Of The Small Business Environment In Saginaw County, George A. Erickcek, Brad R. Watts

Reports

No abstract provided.

Wto Accession: What's In It For Russia?, Abdur Chowdhury

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Prospects for Russia’s membership in the WTO now look better than any point since accession negotiations began almost a decade ago. Good progress with economic and legal reforms within Russia has left the country’s economy better prepared for membership. Nevertheless, the economy still suffers from various weaknesses including, but not limited to, pervasive subsidies for different sectors, lack of liberalization and foreign participation especially in the service sector, inefficiency in custom administration, lack of enforcement of intellectual property rights, etc. For all their sensitivity, the negotiations on the import tariff levels and access to the service sectors are the least …

The Effects Of Globalization: A View From The Developing World, Andrés Mejia-Vergnaud

Center for Applied Economics

Globalization has been hailed as a deliverer and condemned as a destroyer of developing countries. How can globalization elicit such divergent responses? And what do people mean when they praise or condemn globalization?

As you will see in the course of this paper, I will often point to the beneficial effects of free trade and free-markets. The gains from free trade and free markets are indeed relevant from the point of view of public policy: they offer a guide to which sort of policies we should pursue. This doesn’t mean, however, that I believe these positive effects are the main …

Spatial Variations In Wal-Mart Store Location, Clint H. Franklin

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the world's largest retailer, the Wal-Mart Corporation exemplifies unsurpassed store location strategy. The purpose of this study is to identify socio-economic indicators of store location and to determine whether they vary spatially across the United States. First, a linear regression model is employed to identify key socio-economic variables that associate with store location in four regions of the United States. The study includes analyses of Georgia, Indiana, New York, and Washington, which represent the southeast, midwest, northeast and west, respectively. Discriminant and cluster analyses are used to investigate whether there are spatial variations in Wal-Mart location. The results of …

Model State Land Use Legislation For New England, New England Environmental Finance Center, Muskie School Of Public Service

Legislation

Sprawl is neither the ordained nor the inevitable outcome upon the New England landscape. A coordinated response to sprawl by the public and private sectors is possible, and could dramatically improve land use patterns and reduce the cost of local government. For the New England states, such a response would include, among other elements, legislation to eliminate existing gaps in the land use laws of each state – gaps that presently encourage or sanction sprawling development. It would also include incentives for municipalities to think beyond their borders and to act with greater efficiency and effect. It is the purpose …

Pastoral Livelihoods In Urban And Peri-Urban Spaces Of Ethiopia: The Case Of Yabello, Borana Zone, Edlam Aberra

International Conference on African Development Archives

This paper outlines the emergence of pastoral settlements in urban and peri-urban spaces of Ethiopia focusing on Yabello, the present capital of Borana zone. By doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on the manner in which pastoral livelihoods are changing in Ethiopia, and elsewhere in Africa. More specifically, a livelihoods approach is adopted to examine the wellbeing of Borana pastoralists in peri-urban spaces of Yabello in terms of their asset status and use of those assets to pursue various livelihood strategies. The conceptualization of assets goes beyond economic assets to incorporate social and human assets which …

Agroforestry And Community Forestry For Rehabilitation Of Degraded Watersheds On The Ethiopian Highlands, Badege Bishaw, Abdu Abdelkadir

International Conference on African Development Archives

Despite the efforts made to develop Ethiopian agriculture over the years, the problems of hunger, famine, and malnutrition and land degradation still linger and present the greatest threat to the survival of the nation. With the new thrust to produce more food using high input and single crop farming, today’s farmers grow only one or two crops in monoculture systems. The traditional diversification of farmlands, which arguably has been the source of sustenance in rural Ethiopia since time immemorial, has largely been abandoned. Furthermore, deforestation, accelerated soil erosion, and land degradation are now serious problems in Ethiopia. As a result …

Conceptualising Famine In Ethiopia, Getnet Alemu

International Conference on African Development Archives

This paper attempts to explain the nature of recurrent famine, not just as a result of a series of adventitious effects, but more importantly as the unintended outcome of an exclusionary growth model. This adventitious effects matter a great deal, but their impact can only be understood in the light of the inherent weakness of the growth model, which impoverished the peasantry and hence generated their vulnerability to famine.

Environment Stress And Increased Vulnerability To Impoverishment And Survival In Ethiopia: A Synthesis, Tesfaye Teklu

International Conference on African Development Archives

At the core of this short paper is explaining the persistence of environment-induced famine conditions in rural Ethiopia. To start with, there are important empirical findings that set the context. First, poverty is Ethiopia is widespread and deep (MEDaC, 1999; MFDE, 2002). Officially reported poverty head-count measure based on the 1995 nationally representative consumption survey, for example, shows that 45.5 percent of the Ethiopian population could not afford costs of privately provisioned basic needs (MEDaC, 1999). The high-order poverty estimates also point poverty is deep and unequal among the poor.

Openness, Growth, And Development: Evidence From A Panel Of Developing Countries, Farrokh Nourzad, Jennifer J. Powell

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper examines the interaction between openness, growth, and development using a panel of forty-seven developing countries and five-year averages for the period, 1965-1990. Its primary objective is to determine whether there is a direct link between the level of development and openness, while controlling for the indirect effect of openness through its impact on economic growth. Using a two-equation simultaneous-equations model of development and growth and three alternative measures of openness, our findings suggest that openness has a positive influence on both economic growth and human development. We also find that while economic growth makes a positive contribution to …

Development Assistance And The Construction Of Government‐Initiated Community Institutions, Eric V. Edmonds

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper provides new evidence on the role of official development assistance in program implementation. Governments and donors around the world are promoting participatory development and community management program s that transfer responsibilities and rights to local communities. Large-scale implementation of these schemes requires significant funding from multiple sources. I consider a uniform ins titutional reform in Nepal and find that the scope of program implementation and the characteristic s of new institutions vary across types and sources of aid. In my analysis, I develop a geographic matching estimator that compares adjacent communities receiving different types of assistance. This heterogeneity …

Does Fund Size Erode Performance? Liquidity, Organizational Diseconomies And Active Money Management, Joseph S. Chen, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Jeffrey D. Kubik

Economics - All Scholarship

We investigate the effect of fund size on performance among active mutual funds. We first document that fund returns, both before and after management fees, decline with fund size, even after adjusting performance by various benchmarks and controlling for other fund characteristics such as turnover and age. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. We find that the effect of fund size on fund returns is most pronounced among funds that play small cap stocks. Interestingly, performance only depends on fund size and does not decline with family size. Finally, small funds are better than large …

Why Isn't There More Financial Intermediation In Developing Countries?, Michael Kevane, Jonathon Conning

Economics

This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the larger economy often fails or is incomplete. Understanding the nature of these impediments is the first step in proposing policies to help promote more effective linkage and intermediation. We propose four explanations for the slowness of adoption of intermediation (high costs of delegated monitoring aggravated by limited intermediary capital; lock-in and crowding out effects from local insurance arrangements, social norms …

Thy Neighbor's Portfolio: Word-Of-Mouth Effects In The Holdings And Trades Of Money Managers, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong, Jeremy Stein

Economics - All Scholarship

A mutual-fund manager is more likely to hold (or buy, or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers in the same city are holding (or buying, or selling) that same stock. This pattern shows up even when controlling for the distance between the fund manager and the stock in question, so it is distinct from a local-preference effect. It is also robust to a variety of controls for investment styles. These results can be interpreted in terms of an epidemic model in which investors spread information about stocks to one another by word of mouth.

An ‘Ation’ Not A ‘Nation’: The Globalisation Of World Politics, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

A Comparative Analysis Of Growing And Declining Regions In Central Illinois, Clifford M. Cross

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Economic development is the development of tools and programs to promote growth within a specific geographic location. In today's society, the need for economic development is extremely important because the loss of the traditional family farm has changed the landscape of the labor force that currently exists throughout the United States. In addition, a continued pattern of rural to urban migration, of America's educated youth, has contributed to the overall decline of the skilled labor force that exists throughout small rural communities. Furthermore, economic development professionals need to develop tools, programs and practices that create un-skilled, semi-skilled, and skilled employment …

Attraction Visitors In Custer Country Travel Region, Norma P. Nickerson, Bethany Sutton, Jim Wilton

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

The analysis of visitors to attractions in Custer Country provides reasons for visiting the region, activities engaged in, attractions visited, information sources, and demographic profiles of the travel group. Marketing suggestions are provided based on visitor profiles.