Reductions in the cost of transporting manufactured goods have been an important element in economic development in the recent past, and previous research suggests that the Roman period in Britain also saw substantial reductions in such costs. The authors investigate how far it is possible to measure changes in transport costs by considering the spatial distributions of pottery from known Roman production locations over time. Their analysis of an extensive database of pottery assemblages is designed to evaluate a series of expectations concerning how reductions in transport costs may have affected such assemblages and their distribution. Results suggest that costs were reduced by a factor of about two, leading to related changes in pottery production, distribution, and consumption over time. The ability to quantify changes in transport costs opens new perspectives for investigating the general determinants of economic development using archaeological data.

Afin de mieux comprendre la distribution géographique des facilitateurs et des obstacles à la participation sociale des Québécois âgés, cette étude visait à documenter l’Indice du potentiel de participation sociale (IPPS) selon les zones métropolitaines, urbaines et rurales. Des analyses de données secondaires, dont l’Enquête transversale sur la santé des collectivités canadiennes, ont permis de développer et de cartographier un indice composé de facteurs environnementaux associés à la participation sociale, pondérés par une analyse factorielle. En zones métropolitaines, l’IPPS était supérieur au centre qu’en périphérie, compte tenu d’une concentration accrue d’aînés et des transports. Bien qu’atténuée, la configuration était similaire en zones urbaines. En zone rurale, un IPPS élevé était associé à une concentration d’aînés et un accès aux ressources accru, sans configuration spatiale. Pour favoriser la participation sociale, l’IPPS soutient que les transports et l’accès aux ressources doivent respectivement être améliorés en périphérie des métropoles et en zone rurale.

We introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our district identification codes to federal election results. After describing the construction and content of these new resources, we provide an example of their use in a comparative-historical analysis of district compactness in Canada and the United States. We find that, in contrast to the United States, postwar institutional changes to district boundary-drawing processes had little effect on district compactness in Canada.

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic. However, the basic commuting result derives from an urban model in which population density is uniform out to the city boundary and commuters travel individually and radially to the central business district. It is more realistic to suppose that population density declines away from the centre, as in the standard monocentric urban model and that there are likely to be scale economies in both commuting (e.g. from use of buses or metros) and distribution (e.g. larger diameter water mains). The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of such factors for spatial costs, using data on water distribution costs for 35 “urban districts” in the supply area of one of the water companies in England & Wales. Distribution cost elasticities are quantified for two contrasting urban development scenarios, confirming that in the case of Suburbanization average distribution costs are increasing in city size, as generally assumed; however, in the case of Densification these costs are decreasing in city size. The interaction with water production costs is also considered, showing that, in the case of Densification, scale economies in production are reinforced by density economies in distribution, whereas in the case of Suburbanisation they are offset to a greater or lesser extent by diseconomies in distribution, i.e. higher spatial costs. A final section relates these findings to the literature on commuting costs, urban agglomeration and sprawl. It is concluded that high density settlement has the potential to reduce average costs in distribution (including commuting) as well as production, so that both favour agglomeration. Accordingly, urban modelers should be cautious about assuming that commuting (and other spatial costs) are always increasing in city size.