Roger Bolton

Regional Science and Regional Practice

We present some reflections on the state of regional science and how its value might be enhanced. We have two primary suggestions. First, reduce the unfortunate divergence between regional science and practice. Second, pay more attention to places in regional science. More attention to the characteristics of real world places will help to bring regional science and practice closer together.

Regional energy and environmental analysis

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on regional energy and environmental analysis. A basic feature of economic activity is the extraction of materials from the environment, their transformation during production and consumption, and their final restoration to the environment. The economics of environmental resources focuses on the types, forms, and quantities of materials returned, their destinations, and the laws, institutions and markets governing their return to the environment. Energy economics is concerned with similar issues pertaining to the removal and use of energy resources from the environment. The chapter discusses the meaning of energy and environmental resources and describes their special characteristics that are thought to make the regional implications of their production important. It also discusses the effects of energy markets and the importance of energy rents in the interregional distribution of income and elaborates the role of environmental rents in the interregional distribution. The analysis of the distributional effects of energy and environmental resources is an important example of how regional economics is a fruitful approach. The chapter also describes a number of available formal theoretical and empirical models for the analysis of regional effects of the production and use of energy and environmental resources.

INTEGRATING ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL MODELS: SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Abstract In many regions, there are major nonpecuniary components of income in the form of services of environmental assets and of human activities that protect and enhance the environment. Therefore, an important research frontier in regional forecasting and simulation modeling should be the incorporation of environmental assets into input-output and econometric models. Despite its importance, however, work on integrated economic-environmental models has lagged after a spurt of model building in the 1970s. I discuss the importance of the topic and a number of issues that arise in building such integrated models. Specific topics include: theoretical principles that should guide the research; a general matrix framework that accounts for flows within the economy and between the economy and environmental media, and that identifies “environment-improving industries” as separate sectors; possibilities for applying principles of environmental benefit-cost analysis to regional forecasting and simulation models; and important conclusions for regional modeling research. The paper is wholly theoretical; while it presents what one might call a “model of a model”, it has no operational model or empirical specifications.

Equity in financing local services: The case of residential refuse

Abstract The paper is a review of theoretical and empirical arguments on equity considerations in the application of user charges to finance one public service, residential refuse collection and disposal. The main question examined is whether, and in what circumstances, user charges have sufficiently objectionable effects on equity as to offset their efficiency advantages. The effects of user charges and of the alternative, taxation, on both horizontal equity and vertical equity are discussed. A number of empirical studies are examined. The considerable shortcomings of available studies are emphasized. It is concluded that user charges have clear advantages over taxation for horizontal equity, and the vertical equity effects are probably not important enough to offset the horizontal equity and the efficiency advantages. However, special circumstances in a specific locality may warrant a different conclusion.

A Habermas-inspired approach to social capital in regional planning

This chapter shows how Jurgen Habermas’s ideas are relevant to the theory of social capital, in the context of regional planning. Many scholars in regional planning theory find Habermas’s theory of communicative action attractive, and some have suggested an application to social capital. This chapter goes further, especially in adding a discussion of Habermas’s concepts of the lifeworld and normative action. The author compares his own ‘Habermas-inspired’ concept of social capital to some economists’ theories of individual investment in social capital, and argues that regional planning can benefit by drawing on both sets of ideas.