Land protection not only supports vital ecosystem services but also poses important challenges for social equity. Three key concerns emerge from economic frameworks about land protection policies: potential lost local economic development, reinforcement of existing structural inequalities, and disparities in access to the benefits of protected land. This article reviews evidence for each concern and identifies research needs as well as potential improvements in policy that could better support equity goals. Pathways forward towards greater equity include specific mechanisms that can ensure local communities benefit from land protection, attention to issues of spatial impacts and timing, explicit prioritization of equity in land protection initiatives, and community-centred processes. Economists have and can continue to play a role in strengthening these dimensions of land protection policies.

Planning for a low-carbon future in Australia will need to address simultaneously three aspects of sustainable development: centralisation/regional development, mobility and communication. After reviewing existing roadmaps for low-carbon growth by 2050, the article identifies the importance for Australia of an integrated and mutually reinforcing set of measures, based on a bold approach to urban and regional planning. Taking account of national geography, the approach is based on the decentralisation of energy production, use and storage, and on new uses of communication, transport and the location of food, water and mineral resources. Revitalised regional centres could be connected, through new energy and transport solutions, by a national transport arc and electrified highways. The use of infrastructure funding to support low-carbon regional development would avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’, transcending incremental, cumulative approaches based on compensation and incentives for household, business and sectoral abatement efforts. It would generate long-term environmentally sustainable development.

There is renewed interest in levelling up the regions of the UK. The combination of social and political discontent, and the sluggishness of key UK macroeconomic indicators like productivity growth, has led to increased interest in understanding the regional economies of the UK. In turn, this has led to more investment in economic statistics. Specifically, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently started to produce quarterly regional GDP data for the nine English regions and Wales that date back to 2012Q1. This complements existing real GVA data for the regions available from the ONS on an annual basis back to 1998; with the devolved administrations of Scotland and Northern Ireland producing their own quarterly output measures. In this paper we reconcile these two data sources along with UK quarterly output data that date back to 1970. This enables us to produce both more timely real terms estimates of quarterly economic growth in the regions of the UK and a new reconciled historical time-series of quarterly regional real output data from 1970. We explore a number of features of interest of these new data. This includes producing a new quarterly regional productivity series and commenting on the evolution of regional productivity growth in the UK.

Researchers and citizens alike question the long-term impacts of the shale oil boom on local communities. Studies have considered the boom’s effects on employment, income, mobility, and human capital acquisition. This research specifically builds on research considering shale effects on secondary schooling. Using county-level data from Texas, we investigate two questions: (1) Has the latest oil boom led to a reduction in local high school graduation? (2) Is this effect different for immigrants, a group potentially vulnerable to local wage effects? Findings indicate insignificant overall effects; however, local oil drilling increases immigrant high school dropout rates.

This paper studies local economic impacts of the increases in trade barriers associated with Brexit. Predictions of the local impact of Brexit are presented under two different scenarios, soft and hard Brexit, which are developed from a structural trade model. Average effects are predicted to be negative under both scenarios, and to be more negative under hard Brexit. The spatial variation in negative shocks across areas is higher in the latter case as some local areas are particularly specialised in sectors that are predicted to be badly hit by hard Brexit. Areas in the South of England, and urban areas, are harder hit by Brexit under both scenarios. Again, this pattern is explained by sector specialisation. Finally, the areas that were most likely to vote remain are those that are predicted to be most negatively impacted by Brexit

The influence product markets, agglomeration, labor, infrastructure, and government fiscal attributes had on manufacturing investment flows in Indiana between 2000 and 2004 were estimated using Poisson regression, geographically weighted regression, and a spatial general linear model. Counties with access to urbanization economies, product markets, available labor, a high-quality workforce, and transport infrastructure were more likely to attract manufacturing investment. These effects were magnified to some extent when inter-county spatial effects were modeled. The distributional assumptions of the spatial models are different, but both methods are useful for understanding the spatial context of the factors influencing manufacturing investment flows.

The location of ethanol plants is determined by infrastructure, product and input markets, fiscal attributes of local communities, and state and federal incentives. This empirical analysis uses probit regression along with spatial clustering methods to analyze investment activity of ethanol plants at the county level for the lower U.S. 48 states from 2000 to 2007. The availability of feedstock dominates the site selection decision. Other factors, such as access to navigable rivers or railroads, product markets, producer credit and excise tax exemptions, and methyl tertiary-butyl ether bans provided some counties with a comparative advantage in attracting ethanol plants.

The analysis of the evolution of the location of economic activity in Portugal between 1890 and 1980 depicts a strong concentration of productive activity in the coastal regions. We estimate data for regional GDP per capita, which show that the evolution of regional inequality followed an inverted U-curve, in line with that observed in other regions of Europe, but with a rather late peak, in 1970. The reasons for this behaviour may be found in the limits to industrialisation in the interior regions and the benefits generated by the agglomeration economies in the more developed coastal regions.

Cet article démontre sous son jeu d’hypothèses (notamment la présence de gouvernements prédateurs) que le découpage spatial de l’activité publique -recettes et dépenses- peut avoir une efficacité en terme de taux de croissance. Dans un premier temps, on traitera de l’organisation horizontale du pouvoir politique. Les avantages de la décentralisation dus à des effets de proximité seront limités par un phénomène de myopie spatiale propre aux « petits » centres régionaux. Ensuite, l’article s’interroge sur la portée de ses résultats, positifs ou normatifs? Positivement, les propositions de l’article fournissent une explication des « frontières ». Mais du point de vue normatif, elles constituent plutôt un argument en faveur de l’abolition des frontières : en effet, l’instauration d’un « super-centre » hiérarchique, même prédateur, qui centraliserait et contrôlerait les décisions de régions fédérées (par libre consentement), peut réaliser un niveau de croissance supérieur; cette fois, c’est l’organisation verticale du pouvoir politique qui nous donne l’institution socialement efficace.

Cet article propose d’analyser le lien entre la stabilité d’un cartel et les problèmes qui ont prévalus à sa formation. Pour cela nous reconsidérons, dans un contexte dissymétrique, les concepts de stabilité proposés à l’origine par d’Aspremont, Jacquemin, Gabszewicz et Weymark [1983]. L’hétérogénéité des agents dans l’industrie nous conduit alors à adopter une approche « individu par individu » permettant de dresser une typologie des participants potentiels à la formation du cartel. Nous illustrons cette analyse conceptuelle par une application à un contexte de différenciation spatiale.

We consider an economy in which a central government has to decide on the provision and location of an emergency public service the quality of which diminishes with distance. The emergency service has to attend a group of municipalities geographically located in a star-tree-graph. We derive the optimal location and provision, as well as the Lindahl prices for the emergency service. Also, we determine the minimum quality of service that makes efficient the existence of a unique provider for the whole economy. Conversely, given any level of quality of service we identify the stable and efficient structure of provision.