This book examines the impetuses for, and the features and outcomes of, economic reforms in Africa, using the case studies of seven countries to address three main issues: (a) Why do countries embark on economic reforms? (b) What are the features of the reforms undertaken in the various African countries? (c) How well did the reforms perform?

During the last few years, many journal articles have shown the usefulness of the Additive Main Effects and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI) model for analyzing regional yield trials. AMMI helps agronomists and breeders in several ways: to understand or model complex data sets, especially the interactions; to estimate yields more accurately, even with less data; to make better selections; and to design more efficient yield-trial experiments.

This book is the first systematic treatment of these topics, collecting concepts from the scattered literature and also presenting many new results. Although agricultural applications are emphasized here, AMMI is applicable to two-way data tables containing one kind of data, either replicated or not, so AMMI appears in many areas of science and technology.

The volume's first seven chapters review the agricultural and statistical principles and the final chapter indicates the difference that AMMI can make for agricultural research and world food supplies. This book will be of great value to agricultural scientists throughout the world, enabling them to learn more from their data and thereby make greater progress.

The chapters in this book are revised versions of papers initially presented at a confer ence on Universities and their cities held in Amsterdam on March 27-29 1996. There were about one hundred participants and 45 written contributions from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. People with different disciplinary backgrounds, geographers, historians, sociologists, economists and planners among them, attended, as did a few university administrators and local government officials. The intricate relationships between universities and their cities were intensively debated from the perspective of possible contributions by the university to city life as well as from the angle of the city as a milieu that affects the university's functioning. There were theoretical and historical papers, and a series of case studies, some of them comparative, as well as proposals and descriptions of efforts to improve city-university relations. It was a fruitful occasion for many on account of the diversity of experience brought together for the purpose of a debate on a matter of common interest. The vari ous university settings within Amsterdam were visited during a guided tour that pro vided food for thought on the matters under discussion by means of a living example."

Changing desert areas for land use implies a lot of ecological problems. These and related ones are dealt with in this book covering various interdisciplinary and international aspects. Large areas in arid and semi-arid regions are already polluted in various ways. One of the biggest problems is the anthropogenic salinization by inadequate means of agriculture and irrigation. Additionally, most arid areas in the world are dramatically overgrazed. Methods and practices of a sustainable land use in deserts are urgently needed in many arid regions. This book gives a broad survey on some of the affected regions of the world as well as some case studies from elsewhere (Aral Sea, Negev desert, Namib desert etc.). Thus, basic and applied sciences are brought together. Water management in deserts, grazing systems or reclamation of desertified areas are among the topics of this book, as well as social and economic aspects.

The books in this set, originally published between 1968 and 1992 introduce the reader to the many lines of thought in the literature on economic geography and tie these various aspects together within the concept of the economy. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of the Western European economy since the Second World War, and including specific studies and assessments of the Dutch and Italian economies, these volumes examine the economic factors that have shaped cities and patterns of urbanization.

This book examines and clarifies key aspects of regional branding with the special focus of inter-regional brands. Today regions are in strong competition for companies, tourists and most of all talent. In order to differentiate one region from another, regional developers, politicians and planners increasingly focus on establishing the region as a brand. This is by no means easy, since places are complex systems of geographical abstractions in which each place is understood in relation and contrast to other geographical entities. In doing so, regions not only differentiate, but also cooperate (within one country or between countries), building so-called Inter-Regional Brands with an even higher degree of complexity. Accordingly this volume, provides a theoretically well informed but practically oriented overview of this phenomenon - including numerous cases and best practices. As such, it will strongly appeal to both academics and practitioners in the field.

Retailing is changing extremely rapidly in the emerging economies, both as a driver of social and economic change, and a consequence of economic development and the rise of consumer societies. Changes that took many decades in Europe or North America are happening at a much greater speed in emerging markets, while regulations continue to be hotly contested in these markets, raising questions about appropriate business strategies for both globalising firms and local contenders. While much has been written about retail in emerging markets, the focus has been primarily on the nature of entry strategies for Western retail companies. This book seeks to capture the impact of both internal and external regulations on retail development and strategy in emerging markets. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the development of retailing in a wide range of emerging economies, and seeks to capture the interplay between both retail policy and retail strategy and the theoretical implications of this on retail development as a whole. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and advanced students with an interest in retail development in emerging markets, international business/strategy and international marketing.

Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting work and workers in the Global South. Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalisation can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.

How have Africa's large cities provided economic livelihood and shelter to growing populations amidst the continent's protracted economic crisis of the last three decades? African urban areas have not received as much attention as rural studies, yet the continent is steadily urbanizing with profound implications for national economic development and welfare. This book provides fresh insight into the dynamics of African urban economic growth and associated social and political change. Based on recent city case studies and longitudinal data collection, this book outlines economic trends and key urban theories in an accessible style.

This book reviews the main energy sources, production problems and energy perspectives in Germany and Mexico. It surveys the status of traditional and alternative energy sources, including fossil fuels, nuclear, hydraulic, eolic, solar, and hydrogen cells. The book emphasizes the search for answers to such questions as What are the main problems of industries based on fossil fuels, and What is the present status of hydraulic and nuclear energy?

In the new global economy, more countries have opened up to international competition and rapid capital flows. However, in the triad the process of globalization is rather asymmetric. With a rising role of multinational companies there are favorable prospects for higher global growth and economic catching-up, respectively. Theoretical analysis suggests key ingredients of sustained growth, but there is also a new concept of a long-term equilibrium income gap in which convergence is rather unlikely. The analysis also picks up European and US labor market issues in the context of economic globalization and raises the question of which EU policies in the field of labor market reform and of innovation policies are adequate.

The broad spectrum of topics surrounding what is termed the 'knowledge economy' has attracted increasing attention from the scientific community in recent years. The nature of knowledge-intensive industries, the spatiality of knowledge, the role of proximity and distance in generating functional knowledge, the transfer of knowledge via networks, and the complex interplay between knowledge, location and economic development are all live academic issues. This book, the fifth volume in Springer's Knowledge and Space series, focuses on the last of these: the multiple relationships between knowledge, the economy, and space. It reflects the conceptual and methodological multidisciplinarity emerging from this scholarship, yet where there has up to now been a notable lack of communication between some of the contributing disciplines, resulting in lexical and other confusions, this volume brings concord and to foster interdisciplinarity. These complications have been especially evident in our understanding of the spatiality of knowledge, the part that spatial contexts play in knowledge creation and diffusion, and the relevance of face-to-face contacts, all of which are addressed in these pages.

The material here is grouped into four sections-knowledge creation and economy, knowledge and economic development, knowledge and networks, and knowledge and clusters. It assembles new concepts and original empirical research from geography, economics, sociology, international business relations, and management. The book addresses a varied audience interested in the historical and spatial foundations of the knowledge economy and is intended to bridge some of the gaps between the differing approaches to research on knowledge, the economy, and space."

This is a book about the simultaneous location, production and distri bution decisions of a firm entering a competitive market whose spatial nature is describable by a network in which the market either achieves an equilibrium or is equilibrium tending. As such, the problem is of clear theoretical and practical importance, for it is a rather general version of the problem faced by real firms every day in deciding where to locate. Further, the timeliness of this subject manifests itself in the growing excitement and interest found both in the research/academic communities and in the practitioner/private industry communities for more comprehensive approaches to competitive facility location analy sis and equilibrium modeling of networks. The desire both for new conceptual approaches yielding enhanced insights and for practical methodologies to capture these insights drives this interest. While nor mative, deterministic facility location modeling techniques currently provide valuable input into the location decision-making process, re searchers and practitioners alike have realized the vast and relatively untapped potential of more advanced location decision making tech niques. In this book, we develop what we believe represents a major new line of research in the field of competitive facility location analysis; namely, equilibrium facility location modeling. In particular, this book offers a number of innovations in the mathe matical analysis and computation of solutions to location models which we have pioneered and which are collected under a single cover for the first time."

The term 'transnationalism' has gained considerable academic and popular currency despite a lack of clear definitions, in part because its overall form changes as its influence incorporates additional spheres of daily life on a variety of scales and contexts.

The purpose of this volume is to bring together different perspectives on this phenomenon, using case studies that represent some of the most current thinking on 'transnationalism' in a wide range of disciplines. Central themes which this book explores include legal and economic reactions to transnational migration; the (re)negotiation of identities in the context of changing national, social and cultural identities; and the emergence of new imaginings of home and social space in transnational communities. Approaching Transnationalisms: Studies on Transnational Societies, Multicultural Contacts and Imaginings of Home foregrounds powerful transnational forces crossing the boundaries of nation-states, and at the same time, gives attention to the continued significance of the nation-state and the diversity of localized reactions to transnational challenges.

Presently, peri-urbanisation is one of the most pervasive processes of land use change in Europe with strong impacts on both the environment and quality of life. It is a matter of great urgency to determine strategies and tools in support of sustainable development. The book synthesizes the results of PLUREL, a large European Commission funded research project (2007-2010). Tools and strategies of PLUREL address main challenges of managing land use in peri-urban areas. These results are presented and illustrated by means of 7 case studies which are at the core of the book. This volume presents a novel, future oriented approach to the planning and management of peri-urban areas with a main focus on scenarios and sustainability impact analysis. The research is unique in that it focuses on the future by linking quantitative scenario modeling and sustainability impact analysis with qualitative and in-depth analysis of regional strategies, as well as including a study at European level with case study work also involving a Chinese case study.

In nature, radiata pine is very localised and an obscure tree species despite the romantic character of much of its natural habitat. That obscure status and the lack of any reputation as a virgin timber slowed its due recognition as a commercial crop. Nevertheless, it has become a major plantation forest crop internationally. It has become the pre-eminent commercial forest species in New Zealand, Chile and Australia, with important plantings in some other countries. It consequently features prominently in the international trade in forest products, in addition to its importance in domestic markets of grower countries. Very fast growth, considerable site tolerances, ease of raising in nurseries and transplanting, and ease of processing and using its wood for a range of products and purposes, have made it the utility softwood of choice almost everywhere it can be grown satisfactorily. Abundant genetic variation and its amenability to other management inputs created special opportunities for its domestication. The story of its domestication forms a classic case history in the development of modern commercial forestry, with trailblazing in both genetic improvement and plantation management; this inevitably meant a learning process that provided instructive lessons, especially for tree breeders dealing with some other species. Paradoxically, the plantation monocultures have played and can continue to play an important role in protecting natural forests and other forms of biodiversity. Given the attractions of growing radiata pine, there were inevitably cases of overreach in planting it, with lessons to be learnt. Economic globalisation has meant globalisation of pests and disease organisms, and the scale on which radiata pine is grown has meant is has been the focus of various biotic alarms, none of which have proved catastrophic. Temptations, remain, however, to pay less than due attention to some aspects of risk management. The chapter structure of the book is based on historical periods, beginning long before any important human influences, and ending with a look into what the future might hold for the species and its role in human and ecological sustainability. Almost throughout, there has been complex interplay between the technical aspects, local social and economic factors, various types of institution, the enthusiasm and drive of some very influential individuals, and tides of economic ideology, threads that needed to be woven together to do the story justice.

Behind the mystery of economic growth stands another mystery: why do some places fare better than others? Casual evidence shows that sizable differences exist at very different spatial scales (countries, regions and cities). This book aims to discuss the main economic reasons for the existence of peaks and troughs in the spatial distribution of wealth and people, with a special emphasis on the role of large cities and regional agglomerations in the process of economic development.

This book presents multidisciplinary research that expands our understanding of the innovation system (IS) and the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) perspectives on regional economic development. It critically reviews the two concepts and explores the promise and the limits of bridging IS and EE, particularly as applied outside of the bubbling global hubs or to the types of entrepreneurship different from the high-growth variety. Building on these insights, it delves deeper into the links between the academic knowledge and its practical applications in a variety of contexts - from a vibrant London suburb to Latin American countries - with the goal of offering place-specific policy implications. Additionally, the authors advance the inquiry by examining some of the overlooked dimensions of the systemic approaches to economic development such as informal and social entrepreneurship and offers a comprehensive view of the current research at the intersection of the IS and the EE frameworks from the practical perspective. Entrepreneurship and innovation - and relatively new ways to study and understand those within the systems framework - are at the forefront of scholarly and policy debate on economic growth at the moment, making this an important and timely work for academics and policy makers. Contributors include: V. Andonova, M. Belitski, J.E. Cassiolato, A.P. da Costa e Silva Lima, C. De Fuentes, G. de Oliveira Santos, M. del Carmen Roman Roig, N.A. Dentchev, A. Diaz Gonzalez, J. Federico, A. Godley, M. Gonzalo, A. Guerrero Alvarado, S. Ibarra Garcia, H. Kantis, R. Lebre La Rovere, M.C.J. Lustosa, H.M. Martins Lastres, F. Modrego, J.A. Peerally, J. A. Perez-Lopez, M.G. Pessoa de Matos, M.G. Pezzi, R. Pugh, M.G.v. B. Podcameni, J. Schmutzler, V. Servantie, A. Tsvetkova, J.M. Zabala-Iturriagagoitia

Many parts of the world are currently experiencing the outcome of processes of economic integration, globalization and transformation. Technological advances in telecommunications and in transport facilities have opened up new possibilities for contracts and exchanges among regions. External effects among regions have increased in importance. As a result, competition among regions has intensified. Except some pioneering work by regional scientists and scholars of public finance and economics, the phenomenon of regional competition has yet to attract the attention it warrants, despite its importance for policy-making. The present volume is intended to remedy this neglect by providing high-level contributions to the three main topics of the book, the theory of regional competition, methods of analysis of regional competition and policies of regional competition.

First published in 2012, Borders: A Very Short Introduction began with the premise that "we live in a very bordered world." The intervening decade has witnessed a flurry of events and developments that continue to highlight the centrality of borders in contemporary domestic and international affairs, as well as the interstices between the two, including sudden surges in migrant and refugees flows; renewed emphasis on traditional border security and wall construction; growing tensions concerning maritime sovereignty; rapid advances in cybersecurity, surveillance, and biometrics; expanded detention and deportation infrastructures; proliferation of transborder organizations; revived populist and nationalist sentiments; and protectionist and integrationist trade practices, to name some prominent examples from recent headlines. This revised edition accounts for recent developments including Brexit, the 2015 migration crisis across Europe, efforts to build a border wall with US-Mexico, growing isolationist and nativist sentiments, demands for indigenous homelands, transnational protest movements, Russian cross-border incursions, and insurgencies and rebellions across much of North Africa and Southwest Asia.

This book discusses the conditions that underpin configuration of specific places as resource peripheries and the consequences that such a socio-spatial formation involves for those places. The book thereby provides an interdisciplinary approach underpinned by economic geography, political ecology, resource geography, development studies and political geography. It also discusses the different technological, political and economic changes that make the ongoing production of resource peripheries a distinctive socio-spatial formation under the global economy. Through a global and interdisciplinary perspective that uncovers ongoing political processes, socio-economic changes and socio-ecological dynamics at resource peripheries, this book argues that it is critical to take a more profound appraisal about the socio-spatial processes behind the contemporary way in which capitalism is appropriating and transforming nature.

Do dynamic externalities, in the form of technology creation, adoption and spatial agglomeration shape the pattern of regional growth in Europe? This study provides an alternative view on regional convergence. A model is developed which attributes club-convergence to existing differences with respect to the degree of technology adoption. In the first instance, empirical results suggest that the NUTS-2 regions of the EU-27 converge at a very slow rate. Further tests, however, indicate that convergence is restricted to a specific subset of regions. Such conclusions are tested further, using an alternative model of club-convergence, which incorporates the impact of spatial interaction, agglomeration externalities and technology. This shows that the convergence-club in Europe follows a certain geographical pattern and all members share similar characteristics regarding technology creation and adoption, and agglomeration externalities.

This book addresses the social, political and economic turbulence in which the UK is embroiled. Drawing on Cultural Studies, it explores proliferating crises and conflicts, from the multiplying varieties of social dissent through the stagnation of rentier capitalism to the looming climate catastrophe. Examining arguments about Brexit, class and ‘race’, and the changing character of the state, the book is underpinned by a transnational and relational conception of the UK. It traces the entangled dynamics of time and space that have shaped the current conjuncture. Questioning whether increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian strategies can provide a resolution to these troubles, it explores how the accumulating crises and conflicts have produced a deepening ‘crisis of authority’ that forms the terrain of the Battle for Britain.

The aim of this book is to explore the challenges facing rural communities and economies and to demonstrate the potential of spatial microsimulation for policy and analysis in a rural context. This is done by providing a comprehensive overview of a particular spatial microsimulation model called SMILE (Simulation Model of the Irish Local Economy). The model has been developed over a ten year period for applied policy analyis in Ireland which is seen as an ideal study area given its large percentage of population living in rural areas. The book reviews the policy context and the state of the art in spatial microsimulation against which SMILE was developed, describes in detail its model design and calibration, and presents example of outputs showing what new information the model provides using a spatial matching process. The second part of the book explores a series of rural issues or problems, including the impacts of new or changing government or EU policies, and examines the contribution that spatial microsimulation can provide in each area.