This book introduces the reader to local development economics and policy, with a special focus on the place-based paradigm that covers its justification, its difficulties and the types of public intervention that it suggests. The starting point for the analysis is that economic development in lagging places is not to be expected as the result of a mechanism of automatic convergence between backward and advanced regions and that, therefore, the most appropriate development policy is not to maximize competition among all agents in all sectors and places. The failure of the Washington Consensus is examined, and the two competing positions to have emerged from this failure - spatially blind interventions and place-based policies - are contrasted. The main shortcoming of spatially blind policies, namely that immobile resources that could trigger or support a development process often remain untapped or "trapped", is emphasized. The limitations of the "big push" state intervention and wage flexibility solutions to this trap are analyzed and the merits of place-based policies that support intervention and can deal with uncertainty, risk and conflict are discussed.

This book introduces a radically spatialised approach to knowledge creation and innovation. Reflecting on an array of European urban and regional developments, it offers an updated notion of milieu as the conceptual and material space of knowledge and innovation in line with the interpretative turn in social sciences and humanities. In view of the unwillingness of mainstream economics to accommodate such a trend, the authors pursue a broadly understood hermeneutic approach that expands on the triad of knowledge-space-innovation. The book's main findings are that space is an essential intermediary in the connection between knowledge and innovation, and that a renewed notion of milieu provides the knowledge-space-innovation triad with both an analytical basis and operational power. It also offers fresh insights into the significance and potential of the knowledge economy. A number of empirical European case studies on various scales (organisations, cities and territories) support the findings and suggest new policy directions.

This volume enables readers to understand the complexity associated with climate change policy and the science behind it. For example, the author describes the criticism and defense of the widely known hockey stick temperature graph derived from combining instrumental data and proxy temperature indications using tree ring, ice core and other paleoclimatic data.

Readers will also learn that global warming cannot easily be avoided by reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries. Not only is emissions reduction extremely difficult in rich countries, but demands such as the UN mandate to improve the lives of the poorest global citizens cannot be satisfied without significantly increasing global energy use, and CO2 emissions. Therefore, the author asserts that climate engineering and adaptation are preferable to mitigation, particularly since the science is less than adequate for making firm statements about the Earth s future climate.Readers will also learn that global warming cannot easily be avoided by reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries. Not only is emissions reduction extremely difficult in rich countries, but demands such as the UN mandate to improve the lives of the poorest global citizens cannot be satisfied without significantly increasing global energy use, and CO2 emissions. Therefore, the author asserts that climate engineering and adaptation are preferable to mitigation, particularly since the science is less than adequate for making firm statements about the Earth s future climate."

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

The Russian Federation has a history of more than twenty years of transformation to a market economy, but as well to a knowledge society, to look back on. This study takes a look at the knowledge generation, knowledge transmission and knowledge use inside the Federation since the early 1990s. Furthermore, in light of the high dependence of the Russian economy on the oil and gas sectors this study analyzes the impact knowledge related factors have on regional income generation following thereby in the direction of Schumpeterian growth theory. The study combines descriptive with empirical analyses to paint a picture as detailed as possible of the Russian knowledge society and its innovative potential.

For those in developed nations, suddenly being without electricity is a disaster: power cuts have us fretting over the food stored in the freezer, and even a few hours without lights, televisions, or air conditioning is an ordeal. However, for an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide, the absence of electricity is their daily experience. An untold number of others live with electricity that is erratic and of poor quality. How can electric power be brought into their lives when the centralized utility models that have evolved in developed nations are not an economically viable option? Poor, rural communities in developing nations cannot simply be plugged in to a grid.

Small-scale Distributed Generation (DG), ranging from individual solar home systems to village level grids run off diesel generators, could provide the answer, and this book compares around 20 DG enterprises and projects in Brazil, Cambodia and China, each of which is considered to be a "business model" for distributed rural electrification. While large, centralized power projects often rely on big subsidies, this study shows that privately run and localized solutions can be both self-sustaining and replicable. Its three sections provide a general introduction to the issue of electrification and rural development, set out the details of the case studies and compare the models involved, and discuss the important thematic issues of equity, access to capital and cost-recovery.

Hisham Zerriffi shows that in each case, it is not simply a matter of matching a particular technology to a particular need. Numerous institutional factors come into play including the regulatory regime, access to financial services, and government/utility support or opposition to the DG alternative. Despite this, in many countries, the question is not whether DG has a role to play. Rather it is a question of how it will play a role.

Islands face one of the most pressing issues of our time: how to balance ecological integrity with economic development and collective quality of life, including the need for social and conservation space. Islands are sites of rich and varied human and ecological diversity, but they are also often characterized by narrow resource bases and dependency on links to the outside world, and by their limited ability to determine the actual character of those links. This volume reviews the challenges of island development and conservation in the Asia-Pacific region. With emphasis on nature reserves and UNESCO World Heritage sites, chapters describe the benefits, barriers, and potential pitfalls in preserving such sites, managing biota, and attracting and controlling tourism. The book also provides a provocative challenge to move beyond the typical concerns of "sustainability" to the more holistic concept of "futurability," or "future potential" for convivial human-environmental interactions.

This contributed volume is the first book in English to offer a current and critical vision of regional problems and policies in the countries of Latin America. The book is in three main parts: a general overview of regional processes and trends in Latin America as a whole; country-level coverage of seven individual countries; and comparative analyses of common major problems such as migration, education, labor, poverty, decentralization, exports and foreign direct investments. Written by renowned academics and experts from the region, the book seeks to provide a better understanding of regional challenges and trends, regional disparities that exist in many Latin American countries and the increasing importance of metropolitan areas.

As other industries, the global travel and tourism industry has been facing immense challenges and highly visible upheaval since the beginning of the new millennium. The International Tourism Exchange ITB Berlin, the world's leading travel trade show, aims at pinpointing the most important challenges, identifying the trends and offering a platform to solve pressing problems. The ITB Convention Market Trends & Innovations has developed into a centre of excellence and a driving force for the global travel and tourism industry, generating a much needed information platform. This compilation unites the highlights of the convention in articles prepared by renowned professionals and scientists from the industry. Readers may benefit from this comprehensive vision of the developments that are shaping the structure of the global tourism industry today and in the future. This book is indispensable for tourism and travel professionals as well as for academics and students anal- ing current global tourism and travel trends.

The focus of this book is the modeling of the location of economic activities, measured in terms of employment, in land-use and transportation systems. These measures are key inputs to models at intra-urban scales of the flows of persons and goods for both urban and transport planning. The models described here are either components of comprehensive models or specialist studies. Economic activities can be defined in terms of jobs or private-sector firms and public service organisations. Different levels of aggregation are used both in terms of organisational and geographical dimensions. In the case of firms and public organizations, a distinction can be made between the organizations themselves and corresponding establishments. For urban simulation models, it is the location of establishments that is important. At the more coarse levels of aggregation that are usually used in comprehensive models, firms and organizations are aggregated into sectors.

The effective planning of residential location choices is one of the great challenges of contemporary societies and requires forecasting capabilities and the consideration of complex interdependencies which can only be handled by complex computer models. This book presents a range of approaches used to model residential locations within the context of developing land-use and transport models. These approaches illustrate the range of choices that modellers have to make in order to represent residential choice behaviour. The models presented in this book represent the state-of-the-art and are valuable both as key building blocks for general urban models, and as representative examples of complexity science.

This book identifies and analyzes livelihood impacts of recent environmental and socio-economic changes in urban and rural settings of the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh, north western Himalaya, India. The findings of the research deal with the broader objectives of the changing patterns of agricultural production with special reference to diversification, as well as forest-based livelihood outcomes, Clean Development Mechanism forest project activities, the roles of different ethnic groups and non-governmental organizations and the benefits and shortcomings of tourism as a livelihood source. These tasks are studied by using an exploratory approach, with participant observation, interviews through random and cluster sampling among villagers, local land users and officials, as well as with land cover interpretation and secondary statistical data. This book is relevant for educational use together with policy input on the issues exploring livelihood security in a rapidly growing developing country.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

This book explores how integrated management of environmental resources via a nexus approach can help in achieving the respective Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It provides conceptual considerations but mainly practical examples on how to implement a nexus approach in cities and multifunctional land-use systems to increase resource use efficiency and develop a low carbon economy. After sketching out the background and conceptual outline, contributions to the book explore key aspects of the nexus implementation. Specifically, they * Demonstrate how to sustainably use organic waste and wastewater for agriculture, * Explore examples on how to manage multifunctional land-use systems including multipurpose reservoirs, * Highlight the importance of economic incentives for successful nexus implementation, and * Provide a comprehensive perspective on challenges and opportunities of implementation, considering peer-to-peer learning, indigenous knowledge, and stakeholder participation. The chapters in this book shed a new light on key aspects of the interrelation between SDGs and the nexus approach in resilient cities and multifunctional land-use systems, and provide specific examples on how to advance sustainable resources management.

Diasporas have become a visible phenomenon of our world. Wherever we go in the major metropolitan world centres, we run into not only China and India "Towns", but we also witness the individual faces of old and recent immigrants from a variety of other nations flooding the airports, shopping centres and city parks. The impact of these "worlds on the move" on globalisation, migration and identity negotiations is the subject matter of this book.

This book provides a pragmatic analytical model grounded on the solid idea that technologies and the accompanying implementation efforts only make sense if they are successfully deployed in markets. The analytical model also provides an exhaustive analysis of all critical variables at the global, regional and national levels, which contribute to failure or success of technology transfer efforts. The model is validated by an incisive analysis of technology transfer experiences of Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan (province of China), and Malaysia. While this book finds that these East Asian countries have had both diverging and converging models, and experiences with technology transfer, the enduring and fundamental aspects of technology transfer in specific industrial sectors and economic growth in these countries is then used to draw lessons for African countries. This book therefore is a timely and compelling piece of research work that provides valuable answers to the increasingly urgent question of how African countries can industrialize through technology transfer to meet their economic development and growth ideals.

The intellectual renaissance of human geography has included a widespread engagement between its economic and cultural subdisciplines. This volume adopts a variety of conceptual and empirical perspectives on the encounters between economic and cultural geographers. It offers an introduction and 10 chapters by authors in a variety of national contexts to explicate issues such as the cultural turn in economic geography, the cultural construction of economic geographic thought, consumption, gender, everyday life, commodity chain analysis, trust, networks, the creative economy, and tourism. The volume contains empirical analyses utilizing both quantitative and qualitative approaches at spatial scales ranging from the individual to the global economy. In illustrating how human geographers can ill afford to subscribe to the analytically false dichotomy between "culture" and "the economy," the book explicates how cultural and economic geography can be seamlessly integrated, bringing them into a creative tension to their mutual benefit. "

New Zealand and Australia are broadly considered to be countries in which sustainability and responsibility discourses are being pursued by governments and business alike, and in which incentives and initiatives are helping confront and overcome sustainability-related challenges. This book takes a closer look behind and beyond the marketing mantras of both Australia's and New Zealand's "clean and green" campaigns and, on the basis of representative examples and cases, critically evaluates the status quo. The book assesses the effectiveness of sustainability and responsibility models with a focus on the South Pacific and argues that the ways in which issues have been dealt with in this more closely defined geographical region are most likely a good indicator of how similar issues are (or soon will be) dealt with around the globe. As such, the book offers a rich source of cases on sustainability and responsibility in the business arena, a critical review, and an inspirational affirmation of responsible business practice.

This volume explores options for a sustainable maritime domain, including maritime transportation, such as, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP), maritime education and training, maritime traffic and advisory systems, maritime security. Other activities in the maritime domain covered in the book include small-scale fisheries and sustainable fisheries, and greening the blue economy. The book aims to provide the building blocks needed for a framework for good ocean governance; a framework that will serve through the next decade and, and hopefully, well beyond the 2030 milepost of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development. In short, this book brings together the problems of the current world and sustainable solutions that are in the development process and will eventually materialize in the not so distant future. Additionally, the book presents a trans-disciplinary analysis of integral sustainable maritime transportation solutions and crucial issues relevant to good ocean governance that have recently been discussed at different national, regional and international fora, highlighting ongoing work to develop and support governance systems that facilitate industry requirements, and meet the needs of coastal states and indigenous peoples, of researchers, of spatial planners, and of other sectors dependent on the oceans. The book will be of interest to researchers across many disciplines, especially those that are engaged in cross-sectoral research and developments in the maritime transport sector and across the wider maritime domain. To this end, the book covers areas including natural and social sciences, geographical studies, spatial planning, maritime security and gender studies, as they relate to transport and the wider maritime sector. In addition, the book explores frameworks for sustainable ocean governance being developed under the UN's Agenda for Sustainable Development to 2030. It will also look beyond the 2030 milepost under that Agenda, and will be of use to national and international policymakers and practitioners, government actors at the EU and other regional and national levels and to researchers of ocean governance, sustainability and management, and maritime transport.

With the globalization of economic activity bringing about the expansion of markets and deepening of economic interdependency beyond state-borders, a new political challenge arises: how to effectively integrate the interdependent economies into a harmonious unity through the creation of new super-state institutions? This book applies a spatial economics perspective to the understanding of the recent dynamism of the global economy, with particular focus on East Asia. In addition, it examines the prospects of regional integration in East Asia.

This book explores the present conflictual relationship between the economy, the environment, and society. The current mainstream economic model is analysed from the perspective of the founding economists to review its suitability to tackle issues of sustainable development. The problems of redistribution and social justice are debated at length; alongside those concerning the giant state, degrowth, and a vision of sustainability that is founded on the idea of a self-regulating free market economy. Business cycle sustainability, anti-crisis therapy, technological unemployment, the natural rate of interest, and the Bruntland matrix are also examined. This book aims to present a holistic approach to sustainable development where social, ecological, and economic components are balanced. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in this topic.

Contains details on the geological units of Nigeria and the associated mineral resources. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses the geology of the crystalline rocks and their regional distribution while the sedimentary basins constitute the subject of Part 2. Part 3 takes the mineral resources of Nigeria one on one, their geological environment, mode of occurrence, localities and where possible the reserves estimation. Thereafter, an account of the previous and current mining policies (including that of petroleum) of the Nigerian government is given and goes ahead to list some specific investment opportunities in the solid minerals sector.

This book offers a multifaceted overview of the evolution of spatial development, governance and planning in the Western Balkans from an institutionalist perspective. Written by experts in the field, it features various regional and national studies covering topics such as regional and spatial planning, territorial development and governance, and regional and cross-border cooperation in the Western Balkans. Offering a wealth of national, regional and local insights on territorial cooperation, development and planning, this book will appeal to scholars in regional and spatial sciences and related fields alike.

This book investigates the new urban geographies of "smart" metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, 'jumping up' from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the "intercurrence" of city-regional "ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.

This volume focuses on frontiers in regional research and identifies trends and future developments in the areas of innovation, regional growth and migration. It also addresses topics such as mobility, regional forecasting, and regional policy, and includes expert contributions on disasters, resilience, and sustainability. Building on recent methodological and modelling advances, as well as on extensive policy-analysis experience, top international regional scientists identify and evaluate emerging new conceptual and methodological trends and directions in regional research. This book will appeal to a wide readership, from regional scientists and economists to geographers, quantitatively oriented regional planners and other related disciplines. It offers a source of relevant information for academic researchers and policy analysts in government, and is also suitable for advanced teaching courses on regional and spatial science, economics and political science.