Presenting an economic perspective of deforestation in the Brazilan Amazon, this study utilizes economic and ecological data from 1970 to 1996. It examines the extent to which land clearing promotes economic activity and growth and analyzes policies such as road building and subsidized credit. It explores whether the economic benefits of land clearing surpass the ecological costs and considers the viability of extractivism as an alternative to deforestation.

This book traces the interacting histories of the disciplines of ecology and economics, from their common origin in the ancient Greek concept of oikonomia, through their distinct encounters with energy physics, to the current obstruction of neoliberal economics to responses to the ecological and climate crisis of the so-called Anthropocene. Reconstructing their constitution as separate sciences in the era of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism, the book offers an explanation of how the ecological sciences have moved from a position of critical collision with mainstream economics in the 1970s, to one of collusion with the project of permanent growth, in and through the thermal crisis of the biosphere.

This insightful account demonstrates that capitalism in China has a history and a geography, and combines perspectives from both to demonstrate that regional economic restructuring in South China is far from an economic 'miracle's.

Find out more information about the RGS-IBG journals by following the links below:

AREA:

http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0004-0894

The Geographical Journal:

http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0016-7398

Transactions of the Insititute of British Geographers:

http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0020-2754

This is a book about how cities occupy space. We are not interested in architectural masterpieces, but the tools for reinventing city life. We try to provide a framework for the architecture and design of public space without aesthetic considerations. We identify several defining factors. First of all, history as the city today very much depends on how it was yesterday. The geographical location and the technology available at a point of time both play a constraining role in what can be done as well. Culture, in the form of social norms, laws and regulations, also restricts what is possible to do. On the other hand, culture is also important in guiding the ideas and aspirations that together inform what society wants the city to be. The city needs government intervention, or regulation, to ameliorate the problem posed by a tangle of externalities and public goods. We focus on two comparative case studies: the evolution of urban form in the US and how it stands in a sharp contrast with the evolution of urban form in Japan. We emphasise the difference in regulations between both jurisdictions. We study how differences in technological choices driven by culture (i.e. racial segregation), geography (i.e. the availability of land) and history (i.e. the mobility restrictions of the Tokugawa period) result in vast differences in mobility regarding the share of public transport, walking and cycling versus motorised private transport. American cities are constrained by rules that are much further from the neoliberal economic idea of free and competitive markets than the Japanese ones. Japanese planning promotes competition and through a granular, walkable city dotted with small shops, fosters variety in the availability of goods and services. We hypothesise how changing regulations could change the urban form to generate a greater variety of goods and to foster the access to those goods through a more equitable distribution of wealth. Critically, we point out that a desirably denser city must rely on public transport, and we also study how a less-dense city can be made to work with public transport. We conclude by claiming that changes in regulations are very unlikely to happen in the US, as it would require deep cultural changes to move from local to a more universal and less excluding public good provision, but they are both possible and desirable in other jurisdictions.

This volume applies the science of complexity to study coupled human-environment systems (CHES) and integrates ideas from the social sciences of climate change into a study of rural development amid flooding and urbanization in the Poyang Lake Region (PLR) of China. Author Qing Tian operationalizes the concept of sustainability and provides useful scientific analyses for sustainable development in less developed rural areas that are vulnerable to climatic hazards. The book uses a new sustainability framework that is centered on the concept of well-being to study rural development in PLR. The PLR study includes three major analyses: (1) a regional assessment of human well-being; (2) an empirical analysis of rural livelihoods; and (3) an agent-based computer model used to explore future rural development. These analyses provide a meaningful view of human development in the Poyang Lake Region and illustrate some of the complex local- and macro-level processes that shape the livelihoods of rural households in the dynamic process of urbanization. They generate useful insights about how government policy might effectively improve the well-being of rural households and promote sustainable development amid social, economic, and environmental changes. This case study has broader implications. Rural populations in the developing world are disproportionally affected by extreme climate events and climate change. Furthermore, the livelihoods of rural households in the developing world are increasingly under the influences of macro-level forces amid urbanization and globalization. This case study demonstrates that rural development policies must consider broader development dynamics at the national (and even global) level, as well as specific local social and environmental contexts. By treating climate as one of many factors that affect development in such places, we can provide policy recommendations that synergistically promote development and reduce climatic impacts and therefore facilitate mainstreaming climate adaptation into development.

Since cities are likely to play an even more predominant role in the global economy in the future than they do at present, it is important to understand how urban centers are created, grow, and function in the process of generating and distributing wealth. This integrated collection of essays exploring the new economic theory of cities assembles recent work by a number of the world's leading exponents in North America, the UK/Europe, and Japan. Topics investigated include cities and agglomeration, urban systems, urbanization and growth, and cities and factor markets. The perspectives the editors and contributors offer have strong connections with several branches of modern economics, including industrial organization, public economics, international trade, and endogenous growth and economic development.

This edited collection examines the formation of urban networks and role of gateways in Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern world. In the past, gateway cities were merely perceived as transport points, only relevant to maritime shipping. Today they are seen as the organic entities coordinating the allocation of resources and supporting the growth, efficiency and sustainability of logistics (including both the transport and distribution of goods and services). Using different historical case studies, the authors consider how logistics shaped urban networks and were shaped by them.

Retail Geography and Intelligent Network Planning demonstrates the importance of geographical thinking in a wide variety of situations. The book exemplifies the importance of sophisticated and intelligent spatial analysis techniques in dealing with the range of location, distribution and channel management issues which now face retail and service businesses. This technology is especially crucial in an age when traditional channels of physical distribution such as bank branches and shops are increasingly complemented by electronic and virtual channels.

Building on the success of Intelligent GIS (1996), which set out the principles and applications of GIS and spatial modelling for strategic planning, this new title concentrates on the concept of retail intelligence applied to retail planning by presenting examples relating to a wide range of business problems.

Retail Geography and Intelligent Network Planning is an innovative book in several ways:

• Explores some of the key retail trends impacting on retail location and store location studies by drawing on research undertaken in grocery and supermarket retailing, financial services, travel and leisure in Europe, North America and Australasia

• Examines the role of e-commerce and its growth, and argues that geography will still be crucial to its success in the retail sector

• Presents readers with various spatial analysis methods and their usefulness for addressing retail growth strategies such as branch optimization.

• Draws examples from the authors' own expertise over the past fifteen years in retail consultancy

This book is invaluable reading for professionals working in retail location teams and consultancies, and for students studying retail geography, GIS , marketing and management.

This book examines the global influence and scope of medical tourism with an emphasis on the city of Kolkata in Eastern India as an emerging destination at the regional scale. Through a geographical research perspective, the book discusses the importance of the phenomenon of medical tourism including recent trends, policies, and scale studies to develop sustainable strategies for medical tourism at particular micro destinations. In nine chapters, readers will become familiar with the multi-billion dollar industry of medical tourism and the problems currently associated with medical tourism at multiple scales. The trends of medical tourism in and around the city of Kolkata are used to demonstrate the roles of infrastructure and stakeholders in implementing feasible and sustainable medical tourism in an emerging destination. The first two chapters of the book provide an introduction to medical tourism and the methodologies of this study. Then chapters three through nine focus on medical tourism in the case of Kolkata to discuss the regional applications and developments of medical tourism. Topics addressed include medical tourism facilities, stakeholders and tourists, guest-host relationships, an assessment of development versus risk, and an evaluation of strategies to manage rising medical tourism in Kolkata. The concluding chapter discusses future strategies that could be used to implement the potentialities of a metropolitan city as a medical tourism destination, based on studies done in Kolkata. Readers who will find this work of interest include students, practitioners, geographers, and researchers and policymakers engaged in the medical tourism industry.

This book seeks to deepen readers' understanding of world history by investigating urbanization and the evolution of urban systems, as well as the urban world, from the perspective of historical analysis. The theoretical framework of the approach stems directly from space-economy, and, more generally, from location theory and the theory of urban systems. The author explores a certain logic to be found in world history, and argues that this logic is spatial (in terms of spatial inertia, spatial trends, attractive and repulsive forces, vector fields, etc.) rather than geographical (in terms of climate, precipitation, hydrography). Accordingly, the book puts forward a truly original vision of urban world history, one that will benefit economists, historians, regional scientists, and anyone with a healthy curiosity.

This volume documents recent efforts to track the transformation and trajectory of silver during the early modern period, from its origins in ores located on either side of the Atlantic to its use as currency in the financial centres of continental Europe. As a point of comparison, copper mining and its monetary use in the early modern Atlantic World will also be considered. Contributors rely mainly on economic and economic history methodologies, complemented by geographical and cultural history approaches. The use of novel software applications as tools to explain economic-historical episodes is also detailed.

In this book, top Chinese demographers introduce the reader to Chinese population policy, assess its effects and project future consequences.

In the last three decades, the Chinese have conducted the greatest demographic experiment in human history. They have sought to curb the growth of their vast population through the implementation of rigid population policy and programmes. Whilst helping to keep the population from spiralling out of control, the policy has also had unwanted consequences including an imbalance of males to females and the weakening of family kinship and old-age support networks.

This book provides a background to the policy by introducing Chinese history, society, and geographical population distribution. The contributors then examine the relation between policy, culture, and population in the past and present, and project current trends into the future. The book discusses a wide range of socio-economic impacts on China's demographic dynamics, such as employment, social welfare and urbanization. The book's conclusion extrapolates these trends into longer-term population projections.

The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World offers an unprecedented global account of the emergence of modern economic growth and its spread across the world since 1700. Each volume provides a series of regional studies from across the globe, as well as thematic analyses of key factors governing differential outcomes in different parts of the global economy. Written by leading experts in economic history and covering topics such as demography and human development, capital and technology, living standards and inequality, geography and institutions, trade and migration, international finance, and warfare and empire, these volumes offer the most authoritative account to-date of modern economic growth.

Development largely depends on how given places participate in global economic processes.The contributions to this book address various features of the integration of sub-Saharan Africa into the world economy via value chains, so as to explain corresponding challenges and opportunities. The book deals with five issues that have not been covered adequately in scientific debates: first, policies are essential to promote value chains and increase their impact on development; second, value chains are diverse, and the variance between them has major economic and political implications; third, regional value chains appear to constitute a viable alternative to global ones (or, at least, are complementary to them), promising better developmental outcomes for the Global South; fourth, political and socio-economic factors are important considerations for a complete assessment of value chains; fifth, cities and city regions are also crucial objects of study in seeking to achieve a comprehensive assessment of value chains.

This book illustrates and explains the consequences of neoliberal reform on rural economies. Based on an ethnographic case study of coastal fisheries in Iceland, it poses the following questions: How are rural fishers navigating liberal capitalism? And how are new markets, property-rights and digital technologies transforming rural economies? By drawing on an extensive body of literature on economic sociology and science and technology studies, the book offers a novel understanding of the role of market-based reform for rural development.

As a legacy of the socialist state with central planning, Five-Year Planning (FYP) is very important in regulating socio-economic and spatial development even in post-reform China. This book tries to fill the research gap between examining the role of FYP and how spatial elements in the FYP mechanism have operated and transformed in spatial regulatory practices in transitional China. By building a conceptual framework and studying two empirical cases at different spatial scales, with the help of both qualitative and quantitative methods, it helps to understand various stakeholders, institutions and planning administrations, mechanisms of articulating spatial planning into the FYP system and the effectiveness of spatial planning in solving place-specific governance issues in urban and regional China.

This book highlights the first comparative long-term analysis of the negative impacts of large dams on riverine communities and on free-flowing rivers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Following the Foreword by Professor Asit K. Biswas, the first section covers the 1956-1973 period, when the author believed that large dams provided an exceptional opportunity for integrated river basin development. In turn, the second section (1976-1997) reflects the author's increasing concerns about the magnitude of the socio-economic and environmental costs of large dams, while the third (1998-2018) discusses why large dams are in fact not cost-effective in the long term.

This book offers a dynamic perspective on regional entrepreneurship, knowledge, innovation and economic growth, with a particular focus on the role that history and culture play. The authors provide comprehensive empirical analyses offering unique insights into the spatial patterns of long-term differences of regional self-employment, new business formation, cultures of entrepreneurship, innovation activities, and development. Policy implications from the analyses and a discussion of important avenues for future research complete this unique book combining history, culture, and entrepreneurship. This is a superb book with an original, historical take on entrepreneurship and regional development. It is a landmark study on Germany showing that regional levels of entrepreneurship are persistent and resilient, despite many disruptive shocks. Ron Boschma, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Stavanger University, Norway This book presents the distilled wisdom of two leading authorities on the link between entrepreneurship and economic prosperity at a regional level. Although its prime empirical focus is on Germany there are clear lessons for scholars and policy-makers in all high-income countries. David J Storey, University of Sussex, UK

This book examines the economic reasons why people choose to live where they live and develops, through analysis of the bid rent function, a unified theory of urban land use and city size. The first part of the book explicates the basic theory of urban land use and optimal city size. Residential location behavior of households is examined in a microeconomic framework and equilibrium and optimal patterns of residential land use are discussed. The corresponding equilibrium and optimal city sizes are studied in a variety of contexts. Part Two extends the classical theories of von Thunen and Alonso with the addition of externality factors such as local public goods, crowding and congestion, and racial prejudice. The rigorous mathematical approach and theoretical treatment of the material make Urban Economic Theory of interest to researchers in urban economics, location theory, urban geography, and urban planning.

The book focuses on the role political processes play in solving certain key problems which have accompanied economic development in both the developed and less developed nations of the world.
By breaking down the factors which define development into clear cut categories, namely population, food, energy, the environment, and technology, the author offers a useful approach to understanding the problems the world is facing today and will continue to face for the foreseeable future.
The text provides a useful guide and resource for those who wish to grasp the implications of the rapid growth of the world's population, world hunger, the threat of nuclear war, uncertain energy supplies, acid rain and deforestation.

This book highlights the first comparative long-term analysis of the negative impacts of large dams on riverine communities and on free-flowing rivers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Following the Foreword by Professor Asit K. Biswas, the first section covers the 1956-1973 period, when the author believed that large dams provided an exceptional opportunity for integrated river basin development. In turn, the second section (1976-1997) reflects the author's increasing concerns about the magnitude of the socio-economic and environmental costs of large dams, while the third (1998-2018) discusses why large dams are in fact not cost-effective in the long term.

Recent agri-food studies, including commodity systems, the political economy of agriculture, regional development, and wider examinations of the rural dimension in economic geography and rural sociology have been confronted by three challenges. These can be summarized as: 'more than human' approaches to economic life; a 'post-structural political economy' of food and agriculture; and calls for more 'enactive', performative research approaches. This volume describes the genealogy of such approaches, drawing on the reflective insights of more than five years of international engagement and research. It demonstrates the kinds of new work being generated under these approaches and provides a means for exploring how they should be all understood as part of the same broader need to review theory and methods in the study of food, agriculture, rural development and economic geography. This radical collective approach is elaborated as the Biological Economies approach. The authors break out from traditional categories of analysis, reconceptualising materialities, and reframing economic assemblages as biological economies, based on the notion of all research being enactive or performative.

Why do some cities grow economically while others decline? Why do some show sustained economic performance while others cycle up and down? In Keys to the City, Michael Storper, one of the world's leading economic geographers, looks at why we should consider economic development issues within a regional context--at the level of the city-region--and why city economies develop unequally. Storper identifies four contexts that shape urban economic development: economic, institutional, innovational and interactional, and political. The book explores how these contexts operate and how they interact, leading to developmental success in some regions and failure in others. Demonstrating that the global economy is increasingly driven by its major cities, the keys to the city are the keys to global development. In his conclusion, Storper specifies eight rules of economic development targeted at policymakers. Keys to the City explains why economists, sociologists, and political scientists should take geography seriously.

This book examines why the differences in comparative economic development across the world have a geographical pattern. It argues that there is a missing component in the geography versus institutions debate, namely the role of culture and its impact either directly on development or indirectly through the establishment of institutions. The impact of geographical features such as climate and natural resources is studied both across countries and within political boundaries and is supplemented by the work of social scientists in other disciplines on culture and cultural evolution. By examining the direct effects of geography on standards of living as well as its indirect effects via culture and institutions, a case is made to tie all three factors into a cohesive explanation for underdevelopment. This book will appeal to readers interested in wider perspectives on under-development that go beyond explanations resting on standard neo-classical economic theory.

This open access book is interdisciplinary and provides cross-sectoral and multi-dimensional exploration of sustainable development and transportation in South Africa. Drawing on work from different disciplines, the book contributes not only to academia but also seeks to inform urban and regional policy with the view of contributing to the national aspirations of South Africa as espoused in the National Development Plan (NDP), 2030, National Spatial Development Framework (NSDF) Draft (2019), National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy (NCASS) Draft (2019), Green Transport Strategy for South Africa (2018-2050), and National Transportation Plan (NATMAP), 2050. Adopting a multi-dimensional assessment, the book provides a background for co-production concerning climate change, sustainable development, and transportation in the Global South. The book contributes in its analysis of the institutional and legislative framework that relates to the climate change, skills and knowledge transfer, sustainable development, and transportation in South Africa, as these are responsible for the evolution of the green economy and transport sector in the country. The connections among different sectors and issues such as environment, transport modes, technology innovation, vehicle management and emission control, skills and knowledge transfer, legislative and policy framework, and the wider objectives of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially goals 11 to 13. The success stories relating to climate change, sustainable development, and transportation in South Africa are identified together with the best possible practices that may inform better environmental, urban and regional planning, policy, practice, and management.