Arab entrepreneurs in Israel form part of a traditional, yet peripheral, ethnic minority attempting to integrate into Israel's larger economy. This study, based on extensive fieldwork, focuses on the obstacles that these Arab entrepreneurs and new industrialists must overcome in their development towards industrialization. The research exposes a highly flexible entrepreneurial culture making use of a limited set of opportunities and resources. The work makes a strong contribution to comparative cross-cultural research and theoretical formulations on issues of ethnic entrepreneurship.

By highlighting the factors that configured the emergence of India as an ICT superpower from the South and limited success of some countries that long since embraced liberal trade regime, this volume highlights the ways to transform the digital divide into digital dividend. Drawing from the detailed case studies of India and five ASEAN countries, it establishes the complementary role of innovation system and trade regime in promoting production and use of ICT and draws lessons for other developing countries that adopted a liberal trade regime to catch up with the ICT revolution.

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 book presents a compendium of the urban layout maps of 2-mile square downtown areas of more than one hundred cities in developed and developing countries-all drawn at the same scale using high-resolution satellite images of Google Maps. The book also presents analytic studies using metric geometrical, topological (or network), and fractal measures of these maps. These analytic studies identify ordinaries, extremes, similarities, and differences in these maps; investigate the scaling properties of these maps; and develop precise descriptive categories, types and indicators for multidimensional comparative studies of these maps. The findings of these studies indicate that many geometric relations of the urban layouts of downtown areas follow regular patterns; that despite social, economic, and cultural differences among cities, the geometric measures of downtown areas in cities of developed and developing countries do not show significant differences; and that the geometric possibilities of urban layouts are vastly greater than those that have been realized so far in our cities.

The world's leading experts contribute to our understanding of regional innovation, cluster formation and the factors that influence regional productivity and innovative performance. The text improves our understanding of the reasons why, how and where innovation clusters emerge, as well as the factors that determine their respective success or failure. In doing so, it provides a timely and comprehensive picture on innovation, location, networks and clusters as important means in an environment of intensifying interregional competition. The book is written for professional researchers as well as for students and practitioners in politics, business and consultancy.

The globalized economy depends on local and context-specific factors. This edited volume addresses local-global nexuses via case studies of global interactions in developed and developing areas, and of particular firms' approaches to these issues. The chapters build up a prospectus on how best to create globally capable localities.

This book studies the economic impact of container traffic at one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean: the Port of Algeciras Bay (PAB). The authors analyse the global framework of the containerisation business and the characteristics that currently condition this process. Following is an explanation of the physical characteristics of the PAB, and a description of the situation as regards the physical and logistics infrastructure in principal Mediterranean ports.

This volume discusses the latest techniques and their economic applications for modern industries like computer, pharmaceutical, banking and other manaufacturing. These industries are most important for a growing economy. Both econometric and mathematical programming techniques are analyzed so as to develop a synthetic approach. The industrial applications not only emphasize the various aspects of R&D spending, advertisement expenditure and imperfect market structures, but also assess the economic benefits of measuring some specific performance paremers in the light of policy reforms adopted in a growing economy.

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 contributes to an understanding of how bifurcation theory adapts to the analysis of economic geography. It is easily accessible not only to mathematicians and economists, but also to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in nonlinear mathematics. The self-organization of hexagonal agglomeration patterns of industrial regions was first predicted by the central place theory in economic geography based on investigations of southern Germany. The emergence of hexagonal agglomeration in economic geography models was envisaged by Krugman. In this book, after a brief introduction of central place theory and new economic geography, the missing link between them is discovered by elucidating the mechanism of the evolution of bifurcating hexagonal patterns. Pattern formation by such bifurcation is a well-studied topic in nonlinear mathematics, and group-theoretic bifurcation analysis is a well-developed theoretical tool. A finite hexagonal lattice is used to express uniformly distributed places, and the symmetry of this lattice is expressed by a finite group. Several mathematical methodologies indispensable for tackling the present problem are gathered in a self-contained manner. The existence of hexagonal distributions is verified by group-theoretic bifurcation analysis, first by applying the so-called equivariant branching lemma and next by solving the bifurcation equation. This book offers a complete guide for the application of group-theoretic bifurcation analysis to economic agglomeration on the hexagonal lattice.

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 provides insights into important trends and future scenarios in the global tourism and travel industry. It analyses today's challenges in the aviation and hospitality industry, in destination management, and in marketing and distribution management. New empirical data on general travel behaviour and the latest consumer trends are also presented. The contributors to this book are well-known individuals from important tourism, travel and consulting firms (e.g. BCD Travel, Oger Tours, Booz and Company, GfK, IPK International) and researchers from universities in Switzerland, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. In addition institutes specializing in future research highlight important travel trends. Corporate social responsibility is one of the top themes to-be and therefore a focus of this book, offering insights into the concept of CSR, empirical data on consumer requests, corporate strategy issues and financial investment implications."

This volume is devoted to the geographical-or spatial-aspects of population research in regional science, spanning spatial demographic methods for population composition and migration to studies of internal and international migration to investigations of the role of population in related fields such as climate change and economic growth. If spatial aspects of economic growth and development are the flagship of the regional science discipline, population research is the anchor. People migrate, consume, produce, and demand services. People are the source and beneficiaries of national, regional, and local growth and development. Since the origins of regional science, demographic research has been at the core of the discipline. Contributions in this volume are both retrospective and prospective, offering in their ensemble an authoritative overview of demographic research within the field of regional science.

This thesis deals with Rare Earth Elements (REE), especially with neodymium used in permanent magnets, from a very scientific basis by providing basic research data. Despite the fact that REE are newsworthy and very important elements for a considerable bandwidth of todays' technologies, accompanied by the monopolistic supply-situation and Chinese politics, there are inexplicable data discrepancies about REE which have been recognized frequently but usually have not been addressed accordingly. So this analysis started with the hypothesis that the four application areas, namely computer hard disk drives (HDD), mobile phones, wind turbines and e-mobility (automotive traction), account for about 80% of the global annual neodymium-demand. The research methodology was a laboratory analysis of the composition of used magnets for HDDs and mobile phones and a literature and official report analysis of wind turbine and automotive neodymium use. The result was amazing and the hypothesis had to be withdrawn as these four areas only account for about 20% of neodymium use. This result raises some questions concerning actual use and thus potential recycling options.

This study provides an overview of how the Bangladeshi leather value chain is organised and governed. It analyses how the leather processing and leather goods/footwear subsectors are integrated into the global market and to what extent informal arrangements including illicit practices are conducive to global market entry. Power relations are dissected along the value chain, in order to analyse how local producers adapt to upholding competitiveness. The results of the work show the need to devise upgrading strategies which pay heed to the reality of informal dynamics in a global value chain (GVC) to improve the local producers' competitiveness. The GVC perspective was combined with considerations on upgrading, subcontracting, middlemen and informality to adequately analyse the complexity of the transactions in the chain. The data of this study are drawn from empirical field studies in Dhaka, Bangladesh and other sections of the international leather value chain during the time period of 2010 to 2014. A qualitative research approach was complemented with quantitative methods.

This book investigates the industrial agglomeration and dispersion within a country under trade liberalization and interregional integration by considering both economic forces and geographical elements. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction about the background, research topics and organizations in this book. Chapter 2 provides a detailed explanation of Krugman's new economic geography (NEG) model and reviews the subsequent refinements of the original model from mainly geographical viewpoints. Chapter 3 extends Krugman's original model to a two-country and three-region case where the domestic regions are fully asymmetrical in terms of their sizes and accessibilities to global markets. To better explain the reality of developing countries, chapter 4 presents an analytical model which assumes that unskilled workers are employed in both traditional and manufacturing sectors. Chapter 5 empirically investigates the home market effect (HME) in terms of wages in the case of China by using panel data for the period 1980-2012. Chapter 6 gives a summary and implication about the findings and conclusions in this book.

Inequality is not just a problem of poverty and the poor; it is as much a problem of wealth and the wealthy. The provision of public services is one area which is increasingly being reconfigured to extract wealth upward to the 1%, notably through so-called Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). The push for PPPs is not about building infrastructure for the benefit of society but about constructing new subsidies that benefit the already wealthy. In other words, it is less about financing development than developing finance. Understanding and exposing these processes is essential if inequality is to be challenged. But equally important is the need for critical reflection on how the wealthy are getting away with it. What does the wealth gap suggest about the need for new forms of organising by those who would resist elite power? -- .

Strohl examines the evolving network of high speed railway passenger trains in Western Europe. The purpose of the study, in addition to placing high speed train networks in a geographic and economic context, is to introduce the American reader to the evolving system of passenger trains in Europe toward evaluating their feasibility for high-density areas of the U.S. and Canada. Beginning with some general concepts of railway economics, planning, construction, and operation, the author goes on to detail high speed rail networks in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Spain, with additional information on Japan and Scandinavia. This unique work will be of interest to all scholars and professionals in transportation economics and railway systems.

This book applies regional analysis to the challenges facing global investment agencies seeking to enhance trade in lagging regions. It shows how spatial interaction and agent-based modelling can be used as the basis for developing new plans and policies. An in-depth analysis of trade routes is presented, which can be used to develop policies for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Landlocked Uganda and the sea-locked South Pacific Islands serve to illustrate the problems of covering sizable distances, accelerating export flows and improving supply chain efficiency. These examples also provide an excellent illustration of the power of regional science, from assembling data bases in difficult situations to developing and applying models of the trade system.

This book investigates the EU's regional growth dynamics and, in particular, the reasons why peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged areas have persistently failed to catch up with the rest of the Union. It shows that the capability of the knowledge-based growth model to deliver its expected benefits to these areas crucially depends on tackling a specific set of socio-institutional factors which prevents innovation from being effectively translated into economic growth. The book takes an eclectic approach to the territorial genesis of innovation and regional growth by combining different theoretical strands into one model of empirical analysis covering the whole EU-25. An in-depth comparative analysis with the United States is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of the European process of innovation and its territorial determinants. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of EU development policies.

Population ageing has been going on for many decades, but population shrinking is a rather new phenomenon. The population of Germany, as in many other countries, has passed a plateau and is currently shrinking. Demographic change is a challenge for infrastructure planning due to the longevity of infrastructure capital and the need to match supply and demand in order to ensure cost-efficiency. This book summarises the findings of the INFRADEM project team, a multidisciplinary research group that worked together to estimate the effects of demographic change on infrastructure demand. Economists, engineers and geographers present studies from top-down and bottom-up perspectives, focusing on Germany and two selected regions: Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The contributors employed a broad range of methods, including an overlapping-generations model for Germany, regional input-output models, an energy systems model, and a spatial model of the transportation infrastructure.

By examining the issues of environmental policy formation and implementation linked to economic development, and reviewing the Japanese experiences and the examples of other Asian countries, this book reveals factors of dynamism between environmental policy and social change in a domestic, regional and global context.

As urbanization progresses at a remarkable pace, policy makers and analysts come to understand and agree on key features that will make this process more efficient and inclusive, leading to gains in the welfare of citizens. Drawing on insights from economic geography and two centuries of experience in developed countries, the World Bank's World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography emphasizes key aspects that are fundamental to ensuring an efficient rural-urban transformation. Critical among these are land, as the most important resource, and well-functioning land markets. Regardless of the stage of urbanization, flexible and forward-looking institu- ons that help the efficient functioning of land markets are the bedrock of succe- ful urbanization strategies. In particular, institutional arrangements for allocating land rights and for managing and regulating land use have significant implica- ons for how cities deliver agglomeration economies and improve the welfare of their residents. Property rights, well-functioning land markets, and the management and servicing of land required to accommodate urban expansion and provide trunk infrastructure are all topics that arise as regions progress from incipient urbani- tion to medium and high density.

This book contributes to the literature on Geographical Indications (GIs) by providing key theoretical reflections from a five-year review process on the potential of GIs for agri-food products in Southern Africa. The contributors reflect on diverse GI processes and dynamics which operate at the local, national and international levels, thus enriching the understanding of GI dynamics and of the variety of policy options available for GI protection in Southern countries. Following a discussion of the legal framework and governance of national GI schemes in Southern countries, the book emphasizes the main dimensions underlying the development of GIs and their potential for enhancing sustainable rural development and market access in particular. This provides the structure for the chapters that build on the different experiences of Southern African industries that have embarked on GI strategies. The book includes chapters on designing an appropriate legal framework and governance system for the development of GIs in Southern countries.

Thisbook can be seen as the third part of an unofficial trilogy on Sustainable Cities of the Future with the author's previous books 'Sustainable Development, Energy and the City' and 'Sustainable Cities for the third millennium: The Odyssey of urban excellence', both prefaced by Prof. Sir Peter Hall. All three booksfollow the evolving forefront of innovations towards Sustainable Cities. They collectively try to respond to the questions: What future cities wish to build (with their scarcities and capacities) on a finite planet? What do-they do to achieve this? How do-they contribute to redesign the world? The third book adopts, first and foremost, a strategic foresight approach including a scan of the future trends, tensions and risks in a more uncertain world, the possible and preferable futures, emerging policy issues, such as intergenerational cities or cities welcoming the immigrants and their impact on sustainable development, the Rio+20 prospects and the effects of the protracted crisis, efforts by world interconnected cities, including a case-study on Bangkok, a laboratory of urban change, and examples of frugal and resilient urban policies.