Jürgen Essletzbichler

Relatedness, Industrial Branching and Technological Cohesion in US Metropolitan Areas

Essletzbichler J. Relatedness, industrial branching and technological cohesion in US metropolitan areas, Regional Studies. Work by evolutionary economic geographers on the role of industry relatedness for regional economic development is extended into a number of methodological and empirical directions. First, relatedness is measured as the intensity of input–output linkages between industries. Second, this measure is employed to examine industry evolution in 360 US metropolitan areas. Third, an employment-weighted measure of metropolitan technological cohesion is developed. The results confirm that technological relatedness is positively related to metropolitan industry portfolio membership and industry entry and negatively related to industry exit. The decomposition of technological cohesion indicates that the selection of related incumbent industries complements industry entry and exit as the main drivers of change in metropolitan technological cohesion.

Renewable Energy Technology and Path Creation: A Multi-scalar Approach to Energy Transition in the UK

This paper examines the potential contribution of UK regions for developing and deploying renewable energy technologies to achieve the government target of obtaining 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. The paper argues for a multi-scalar approach to energy transition theory and policy. National-scale processes and policies need to be complemented by regional and local policies in order to discover and incorporate meso-level sources of renewable energy, recognize that niche or path creation is a geographically localized process and mobilize heterogeneous, local actors around common “regional energy visions” to improve implementation of renewable energy projects. After critically reviewing the main theoretical approach to energy transitions, the multi-level perspective, the paper employs patent data to describe the comparative position of UK regions in the renewable energy sector and examines the success of Danish, German and Spanish regions resulting from strong government intervention at the national level supplemented by region-specific strategies. A number of policy strengths and shortcomings are identified in the evolutionary trajectory of the UK energy system including weak technology push and policy pull factors. Finally, the paper reviews existing regional renewable energy policy and speculates on the potential impact of recent changes in spatial and energy policies on the ability to deploy and develop renewable energy sources in the UK.

The Geography of Job Creation and Destruction in the U.S. Manufacturing Sector, 1967–1997

Abstract Much geographical research focuses on the causes of geographical differences in net employment change. While net employment change is an important indicator of regional growth and decline, it masks the underlying process of creative destruction resulting in tremendous employment turnover rates. Labor economists and those who work in industrial organization emphasize the importance of theorizing the individual processes of job creation and destruction to uncover technological and institutional differences among industries and over the business cycle. This work demonstrates that over the course of a year, 10 percent of all jobs are destroyed and close to 10 percent of jobs are newly created. This article bridges the work of geographers on net employment change and the nongeographical work in industrial organization and provides the first comprehensive account of regional and metropolitan differences of job creation and destruction in U.S. manufacturing. Plant level data of the U.S. Census Bureau show that geographical differences in net employment change are primarily the result of differences in job creation rates and to a lesser extent in job destruction rates, that different types of plants drive the job creation process in different metropolitan areas, and that the snowbelt/sunbelt dichotomy collapses in the 1990s with selected midwestern urban areas among the fastest growing areas in the country.

Diversity, stability and regional growth in the United States, 1975-2002

Applied Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography aims to further advance empirical methodologies in evolutionary economics, with a special emphasis on geography and firm location. It does so by bringing together a select group of leading scholars including economists, geographers and sociologists, all of whom share an interest in explaining the uneven distribution of economic activities in space and the historical processes that have produced these patterns.

Technological evolution as creative destruction of process heterogeneity: evidence from US plant-level data

Change in evolutionary economics is predicated on the creative destruction of variety. Despite the importance of the concept of variety, or heterogeneity, in evolutionary economic theory, empirical work that examines the character of variety – its extent and its persistence – is still scarce. Drawing on unpublished, micro-level data from the US Bureau of the Census, this paper examines the characteristics of process heterogeneity in selected US manufacturing industries. More specifically the paper has three goals. First, to demonstrate that heterogeneity in plant technologies exists and that it persists over time even within relatively mature industrial sectors. Second, to examine the veracity of the processes that generate and destroy heterogeneity in production technology within narrowly defined industries. Third, to link the heterogeneity of plant-level techniques of production to the pace and direction of technological change at the level of the industry.

The Geography of Gross Employment Flows in British Manufacturing

This article offers a first attempt to examine subnational differences in the determinants of gross employment flows in the British manufacturing sector utilizing the Annual Respondents Dataset (ARD) of the Office of National Statistics. The article has four broad aims. First, it examines how the job creation and destruction process in British manufacturing compares with the processes in other countries. Second, it examines how much job creation and destruction is the result of employment shifts from declining industries and post-code areas to growing industries and areas relative to employment turnover that occurs among plants within industries and areas.The results indicate that high rates of job creation and destruction occur simultaneously in contracting as well as expanding industries and areas, suggesting that differences in net employment change can only be considered as a first step to understanding employment turnover. Third, the article investigates differences in the driving forces of job creation and destruction for British postcode areas and uncovers pronounced variation in the forces generating and destroying employment. Fourth, the article examines how much of these subnational differences can be attributed to industrial structure and reveals that industry-mix accounts for a large part of employment turnover in postcode areas.The large variation in the driving forces of job creation and destruction leads to important consequences for employment policy.Policies which focus too narrowly on new-firm start-ups and small firms are likely to be insufficient in generating employment in all areas.

The Impact of Industry Mix, Technological Change, Selection, and Plant Entry and Exit on Metropolitan Labor Productivity in the United States

This paper examines the impact of changes in industry mix, changes in technology, differential plant growth, plant entry and plant exit on metropolitan labor productivity growth between 1963 and 1997. Analysis is based upon unpublished plant-level data from the United States Bureau of the Census. We show that manufacturing productivity varies markedly between metropolitan areas in the United States. The most influential components of productivity growth are technological changes within incumbent plants and changes in industry mix. Significant differences in the relative contributions of these components of productivity change exist across metropolitan areas. Regional differences in rates of plant openings and plant closures also exert considerable impact on metropolitan productivity improvement.

Regional dynamics of technical change in the U.S. structural fabricated metals industry

Abstract Techniques of production are measured in the structural fabricated metals industry across 35 states of the U.S. between 1964 and 1992. Contrary to life-cycle models and equilibrium-based theories of technology diffusion and competition, production coefficients vary markedly between regions and these differences show little sign of diminishing over time. Further investigation reveals that states have tended to occupy relatively similar positions in ‘technology-space’ over the last thirty years or so. These findings support evolutionary hypotheses about the path-dependent nature of technological change. The impacts of innovation, imitation, selection and firm entry/exit on aggregate technical change in the structural fabricated metals industry are separated. Innovation is shown to be responsible for about 45% of the improvement in techniques of production since 1964.

The Austrian Association for Radical Geography: an interdisciplinary approach towards social and political change

Introduction As with Anglo-American geography, Austrian geography fails to engage in public discourse. This does not refer to a lack of important research projects, but to a lack of public accessibility to the research outcome. Academic knowledge produced at universities is increasingly restricted to an ever smaller number of highly specialized scientists. In turn, academia becomes a departmentalized and closed system where research is conducted for researchs sake, and publications are produced for publications sake. Increased specialization leads to extended compartmentalization of already narrow disciplines. Whereas academics in the 1960s held lectures on street barricades in Paris, Berkeley, or Berlin, academics at the turn of the century retreat comfortably from public discourse, protected from external criticism by barriers of scientific jargon and mathematical abstractions. The Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Kritische Geographie (Austrian Association for Radical Geography) deviates from this path and continues the legacy of critical discourse with traditional geography and its conservative contents initiated by Anglo-American and French geographers in the 1960s.

Darwin's Conjecture. The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution

Inventive City-Regions presents the results of a research project in which the authors have explored and analysed the strategies adopted to strengthen the economic profile and competitiveness in seven European cityregions: Amsterdam, Munich, Helsinki, Barcelona, Manchester, Birmingham and Leipzig. Special attention was paid to strategies aimed at creative and knowledgeintensive industries and affiliated institutions and, particularly, how policy-makers attempted to attract firms, investors and specialized workers in these sectors. Besides the case studies and the introductory and concluding chapters, the book has chapters on the theoretical background, the research design and methodology, and a brief statistical comparison of the cases. Most of the book is devoted to the case studies. In each of these the authors first present the key figures and facts and then outline the development path of the particular city-region. After introducing recent trends and current developments, the survey respondents’ views on the special characteristics of the cityregion are presented. The following subsections on the development policies, regional cooperation and competition, and the city-region’s future, particularly in light of its creativity, innovation and knowledge potential, draw on the views of a wide range of interviewees drawn from the policy-making, business, higher education and non-governmental sectors. Each case study concludes with a SWOT analysis (elaborating on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). As such, the authors have done a tremendous job in identifying and interviewing key regional experts and bringing their views together with the relevant secondary literature and statistical data. Besides providing additional and compiled information on regional development paths and strategies, this book invites us to step into the mindset of regional policy-makers and to reflect on the current state of the scientific literature. Few things stand out from the interviews as clearly as worries regarding regional competitiveness and the relative performance or attractiveness towards rival city-regions in the home country or abroad. In this regard, the authors note in the one theoretically oriented chapter (Chapter 4) that any single city or city-region ranking alone should not be taken as a reliable measure of competitiveness. However, they do not discuss any other type of pitfalls, most importantly the easily created illusion that the absolute wellbeing in a region is caused by its relative performance and not the other way around. It is, of course, always interesting to compare cityregions, and well-performing cities can always be used as benchmarks. However, it is easy to forget that regions do not compete as rival firms in the same industry would do and that one’s gain is not another one’s loss. It seems that competitiveness is not only a dangerous obsession in national politics (KRUGMAN, 1994), but has increasingly become one in regional politics as well. Various reasons can be invoked to explain this confrontation between city-regions, but arguably one stands out in the ambiguous theoretical literature on regional economies. The short theoretical chapter also seems to convey the idea that the authors consider the contemporary literature both conceptually and theoretically messy. They conclude the chapter by noting that the current debate largely revolves around the question of whether it is creative people (that is, the ‘creative class’) or knowledge-intensive firms that are the engine of regional growth and development and, hence, the critical factors that ‘wanna be’ inventive city-regions should attempt to attract. Whether individuals or firms, however, a proper term for a situation in which city-regions compete for a given pool of creative talent would be a ‘war of attraction’. When city-regions compete by making costly and (partially) irreversible investments to become more attractive, the situation becomes much like an all-pay auction with the well-known results: social waste and zero expected return to all, except possibly the winning bidders (for example, BAYE et al., 1996). From the point of view of the creative class and knowledge-intensive firms, the situation is of course favourable as they are able to appropriate all the positive externalities created through their local activities. Additional concern arises for creative industries as well, however. Under many conditions creative firms and people would find the optimal location in any case, but with competitive bidding between regions Regional Studies, Vol. 45.7, pp. 1013–1017, July 2011