Suahasil Nazara

Agglomeration and Trade: Some Additional Perspectives

The form of agglomeration economies (those internal to the firm as well as those external to it) is reviewed. Consideration is next given to recent changes in the regional (state) economies of the US Midwest, as part of an effort to explore the evolving nature of agglomeration economies. Particular attention is paid to the changing relationship between the establishment and the firm and to radical developments that have affected the transportation sector. The impact of these changes on the nature of interstate trade and on the structure of the metropolitan economy are then examined. There follows a discussion of how agglomeration economies are being supplemented and perhaps replaced by less spatially-constrained advantages. Finally, certain of the more important implications of these various trends are discussed.

An exploratory analysis of hierarchical spatial interaction: the case of regional income shares in Indonesia

Regional interaction is generally understood as implying movement between regions at the same level of an hierarchy. This paper extends the notion to include an hierarchical system, thus facilitating the consideration of vertical interaction in the analysis of regional interaction. Obviously, vertical interaction is not altogether a new concept. One could find this concept in many analyses related to national-local or federal-state relationships. This paper treats hierarchy in a strict sense; spatial units are interacting one with another within, but not between, presumed super regions. A particular example drawn in this paper is the province-region relationships for the case of Indonesia. In this framework, provinces form a region, and regions form the nation. The Dendrinos–Sonis model is then used as the basis for measuring the hierarchical spatial interaction in Indonesia. The analysis will explore the degree to which complementarity and competitive interaction revealed at one level in the hierarchy persist at lower or higher levels.