Lanfranco Senn

Service Activities’ Urban Hierarchy and Cumulative Growth

It is becoming increasingly evident that economic growth is a cumulative process, and spatially uneven business services now play the strongest role in promoting economic growth. They do it mainly by locating in large cities, where they are attracted by both the concentration of demand and agglomeration economies with other services. However, large cities are not the only place where business services locate. They are also present across all levels of the urban hierarchy, which they change through their networking functions, their multiplant organisation or their market strategy. The interest in monitoring the role played by business services in the changing pattern of economic growth makes conceptual and empirical difficulties in the measurement of service activities all the more challenging.

Regional Growth, Connections and Economic Modelling: An Introduction

With increasing globalization over recent decades, the impacts of economic stimuli at the national level have diminished in terms of their importance for economic processes; the stimuli are increasingly originating at the international level. As markets integrate, the competitors of firms are generally firms from other countries and the domestic market is no longer and not necessarily the most important one. At the same time, the internal resources of firms are no longer sufficient for their competitiveness in a globalized World, and, to sustain their growth, they have to rely increasingly on external resources, knowledge in particular, which are normally accessible at the local and regional level (Audretsch 1988). The regional scale, therefore, has increased in importance for economic growth as a result of globalization forces; competition is now centered on region-region interactions with the regions often located in different countries. This book is concerned with the study of regional economic growth in advanced countries. The focus is essentially on the dynamics of regional performance and on the mechanisms that allow some regions to grow more rapidly than others, to become more competitive and to remain so in the long run. This book therefore draws on regional science literature that is concerned with the growth of regions with the primary purpose of clarifying which mechanisms are at work and the secondary purpose of clarifying which development policies ought to be applied. The distribution of economic activities, involving the detection and explanation of location and agglomeration, its efficiency and its evolution, is the other traditional body of economic geography literature from which the analysis in this book also draws heavily (Isard 1956; Gabszewicz et al. 1986; McCann 2002). These two strands of literature cannot be considered as separate; on the contrary, they are clearly complementary since no agglomeration takes place without growth differentials; nor can the dynamics and development patterns of regions be studied or influenced without knowing what drives location decisions and what

Structural change decomposition through a global sensitivity analysis of input-output models

Abstract Sensitivity analysis has become an important tool to test the robustness of estimated economic models. In this paper we propose the use of simulation-based sensitivity analysis to identify the fundamental structure of the economy. To show the possibilities of this technique, we provide empirical evidence on the path of structural change occurring in the Chicago economy by running simulations for projected input–output tables over the period 1975–2010.

The Impact of Urban Structure on the Location of Producer Services

This article aims at estimating the density functions and gradients related to the locations of services in Milan. Density curves constructed from data on the location of producer services confirm theoretical expectations and the pattern of their location clearly assumes a quadratic exponential shape. The better to understand the interrelation between services and space at the intra-urban level, a number of indices and coeficients have been analysed. In order to verify the impact of urban structures on services locations a comparative analysis has been made on the effects of a new underground line. The impact of urban structure on services location has been confirmed.