ABSTRACT
This article draws upon novel survey evidence to examine the possible regional impacts of Brexit as a ‘disruptive process' to manufacturing operations and logistics in the automotive industry, in the context of the regional resilience literature. The current Brexit (and Covid-19) context, along with the sector's need to re-orientate towards electrification, provides renewed urgency to reconsider industrial policy in spatial terms. The findings have salience not only in the context of anticipating and reacting to Brexit-induced economic shocks at a regional level, but also over the role of decentralized regional bodies. In this regard, the UK government's agenda of ‘levelling up' will be challenging, especially in the context of the place-based shocks likely to arise from Brexit as well as the impact of Covid-19. The article concludes that a more place-based regional industrial policy is required both to anticipate and to respond to shocks and also to reposition the sector in the region going forward.
ABSTRACT
The decline in Russian business activity due to the Covid restrictions was much lower than forecasted by international financial institutions. Even the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector, which experienced a significant downturn, in 2021 demonstrated a recovery and intentions to conduct business. The present study aims to reveal the impact of regional authorities on the activity of small and medium-sized enterprises during the crisis, coupled with the entrepreneurs' own efforts and economic freedom in the region. To this end, a case study of Sverdlovsk oblast, a large Russian region with a diversified industrial structure and a developed SME sector, was analysed. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were utilised in the case study. Qualitative methods include semi-structured interviews with CEOs aimed at identifying deep motives of activity and diversity of business responses to external challenges. As for quantitative methods, the economic freedom index of the region for 2002-2020 was calculated using the Coates method, the relationship between entrepreneurial activity in Sverdlovsk oblast and government intervention in the regional economy was assessed based on the ordinary least squares regression. The study demonstrated that the number of individual entrepreneurs depends on the government participation in the regional economy, while the activity of legal entities is more related to economic freedom. During the crisis, demand reduction and change, real income decline, restrictions on cross-border transactions and a growing concentration of market power accelerated changes in companies' business models in terms of interaction with consumers, value proposition, networking and digitalisation of business. Additionally, business associations involved in the interaction between companies and public authorities gained importance in this period. The research results can be applied in the design of public policy measures for the small and medium-sized enterprises and regional development.
ABSTRACT
As a susceptible demographic, elderly individuals are more prone to risks during sudden disasters. With the exacerbation of aging, new challenges arise for urban disaster reduction and prevention. To address this, the key is to establish a community-scale resilience assessment framework based on the aging background and to summarize factors that influence the resilience level of communities. This approach is a crucial step towards seeking urban disaster prevention and reduction from the bottom up, and serves as an important link to enhance the capacity of urban disaster reduction. This paper explores community resilience evaluation indicators under the background of aging, builds a community resilience evaluation index system based on the Pressure–State–Response, uses the entropy weight method to weigh the indicators, and carries out a resilience evaluation of 507 communities in the main urban area of Changchun. The empirical results indicate significant spatial differentiation of community resilience in the main urban area of Changchun. Moreover, the regional development is unbalanced, showing a spatial distribution pattern of weakness in the middle and strength in the periphery. The ring road network highlights the difference between the new and old urban areas. The high contribution indexes of community resilience in the main urban area of Changchun were concentrated on disaster relief materials input, community self-rescue ability, and disaster cognition ability. Finally, strategies to improve community resilience are proposed from the perspectives of stress, state, and response, emphasizing community residents' participation, conducting disaster prevention and reduction training, and improving community response-ability.
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The creative economy sector is tightly associated with sustainable development and Sustainable Economic Goals (SDGs). The creative industries contribute to sustainability in a variety of ways. They are essential in accelerating sustainable consumption and production patterns and promoting regional sustainable development. This paper attempts to stress the role of the creative economy in promoting sustainable regional growth by focusing on smart specialization priority areas in the region of Attica. The latter has been accomplished by presenting the current regional policy model and the entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP) methodology in the region of Attica. This paper concludes that the EDP paves the way for the formulation of policy lessons enhancing the link between the creative economy and sustainable regional growth. In a nutshell, three major conclusions derived from the present paper include the following aspects: (i) the formulation of an integrated smart specialisation strategy requires an ongoing and well-structured process along the policy cycle (structured life-cycle approach);(ii) the deployment of a robust innovation ecosystem requires a comprehensive approach of engaging and mobilising regional actors and identifying their needs and priorities;(iii) the lessons observed through the exploration of the case study lead to concrete findings regarding the critical importance of long-term interactive institutional learning and policy co-design as a precondition for an effective regional ecosystem.
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This article focuses on the cross border rural areas located in the suburban zone of big agglomerations in border regions of Hungary and Slovakia. Special attention is devoted to demographic processes and phenomena related to these facts. Besides generally acceptable statistical data represents other data collected via field research in communities representing suburban survey. It focuses on socio-economic effects of suburbanisation, analyses its impact on society of suburban inhabitants in Slovakia. There is a comparison between cross-border survey about the suburbanized rural life standards before and after 2020 to predict current trends influenced by pandemic Added value is the results of measuring gap in economic and demographic development in the cross-border regions mainly between Hungary and Slovakia during COVID-19 pandemic
ABSTRACT
The issue of the development of airport infrastructure in a given territorial unit, particularly its effect on that unit, is a complex phenomenon that requires study and analysis. Therefore, the main aim of this article is to analyse the functioning of airports in crisis states that have taken place recently. The airport embodies an enormous and yet untapped potential. Airports can perform not only the functions of transportation and communication, but they can also be important catalysts for economic prosperity, and thus create development opportunities for many regions and administrative units. Assumption made that the following and overlapping crisis states strongly slow down the development and negatively affect the functioning of airports, and this translates into local and regional increase of a given spatial unit in which a given airport is located. Therefore, this study is devoted to answer the following questions: (1) what are the function of modern airports and what is their impact on various industries of the economy in the given area;(2) what is airports' contribution to creating new jobs;(3) what are the effects of the airport on the socio-economic development of the spatial unit, taking into account the current impacts a result of the crisis, which was the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and the military conflict in Ukraine which was started in 2022;(4) what is the strategic importance of airports in connection with the performance of important functions for a given area, especially in periods and states of crisis threat. As a result of the conducted analyses presented were the potential opportunities and threats for the development of airports, from the perspective of economic and social growth, and against the background of global and European trends, as well as the Polish market conditions and the growing importance of ensuring safety.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is a substantial challenge for national economies. The survivability and better performance of some companies can serve as lessons for others, and those who learn the said lessons faster will take the lead in the post-COVID world. One of the national economic development drivers is high-growth firms (HGFs), also known as gazelles. High-growth middle-sized firms (HGMFs) have a notable impact on the national economy as significant employers, producers, and tax-payers. This paper aims to find the peculiarities in the reactions of HGMFs to the COVID-19 pandemic based on Russian firms' data. This research uses the official statistics of middle-sized Russian firms (7944 firms, 238 gazelles). Gazelles are identified based on 2016-2019 data and then compared with normal medium-sized firms (NMFs) using 2020 data. In total, 14 hypotheses are formulated and tested, with those hypotheses focused on five aspects of firms' performance: the ability to grow, profitability, efficiency, solvency, and employability. The research utilizes a one-way ANOVA test and Z-test for proportions for different types of hypotheses. Hypotheses testing shows that HGFs demonstrate better ability to grow, better efficiency, better solvency, and better employability than normal firms. However, they cannot maintain their higher profitability in 2020, despite higher net income values in comparison with other companies. The research confirms that HGMFs have unique capabilities to overcome these kinds of crises, and that such capabilities can be scaled to other business entities to increase their survivability in times of future crises. The research can be extended to small firms, 2021-year data analysis, and comparative cross-industry or cross-country analysis.
ABSTRACT
As an important part of the ecosystem, green vegetation coverage is crucial to people's sensory and mental health. Using reliable data sets to classify and identify the green vegetation cover on the land surface and explore its spatial distribution law can provide important reference for the work of regional ecosystem managers and urban planners. The optimization of effective screening methods for green vegetation coverage areas is an important requirement to measure the surface vegetation status. UAV aerial images feature high definition, large scale, small area and high up-to-dateness. However, at present, there are few studies based on the reliable UAV aerial image system to identify green vegetation cover and further explore its spatial changes. In this study, 701 residential neighborhoods in Beijing were taken as the research objects, and the green vegetation of 7,695 sample points was identified by UAV. The green vegetation coverage was measured, and the spatial distribution pattern of green vegetation in different land surface areas was quantitatively compared. The results show that the image processing method proposed in this paper can effectively detect the boundary of green vegetation cover area from UAV aerial images, the correlation of texture segmentation is good, and the segmentation performance is better than other methods. The distribution of green vegetation cover in the research target area is uneven, with 63.79% of the research area having relatively low (Level 2) and medium (Level 3) green vegetation coverage, which indicates that the green vegetation coverage area in the research area is insufficient to meet the needs of regional ecosystem development. The characteristics of green vegetation cover in 16 districts in the study area are different, showing different spatial distribution patterns;except Xicheng District, there are 211 points without landscape in the area covered by green vegetation in 15 districts. The results can provide support for urban land surface planning and management.
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China's energy structure is dominated by fossil fuels, especially coal consumption, which accounts for a relatively high share. In January 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak affected the global coal market, and many countries experienced negative economic growth. Economic development requires energy consumption. In 2021, China set a target of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 in order to phase out the dependence of carbon emissions on economic development. Therefore, the aim of this article is to develop directions for the sustainable development of China's coal industry. Based on the macroenvironment and situation analysis, the article concludes that, under the influence of geopolitics, China's shortage of imported coal resources and China's continuous rise in coal demand, the share of coal in China's energy structure will not decrease significantly in the long-term. The main directions for the sustainable development of China's coal industry are to ensure the safety of coal energy storage and improve the level of safety supervision;coordinate the development of regional energy;increase the clean, efficient, and low-carbon utilization of coal;and strengthen international coal strategic cooperation.
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The focus of this research is to identify the dynamics of regional economic development through digital trends towards tourist visits and the promotion of tourist destinations in the Lake Toba area during the F1 Powerboat World Championship (F1H2O) event on Lake Toba, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Through the conduct of online research methods (ORMs) in diagnosing digital social issues and trends regarding the events, the results show that there was an effort to maximize the increase in regional economic development, by utilizing the potential and attractiveness of holding the F1 Powerboat as part of sports tourism. As an event aims to spur the movement of domestic tourists to super-priority destination areas, the implementation of the F1 Powerboat event is not only a driving force in the recovery and improvement of the local economy after the COVID-19 Pandemic, but also a venue for the promotion of other tourist destinations in North Sumatra. However, the positive impacts of this event organization on sustainable economic growth in the surrounding areas is not without reservations. The event has received some negative feedback, which include the problems of event preparation and implementation, and also the limited awareness of local community tourism. This research suggests that in order to achieve sustainable regional development and urban resilience, the future organization of sport tourism events should not only focus on the economic objectives, but also on the other aspects including socio-cultural and environmental perspectives. © 2023 by the authors.
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This study aims to analyze the factors influencing unemployment and determine the role of stakeholders in reducing unemployment in Central Java Province, Indonesia. Data encompasses 35 regencies and municipalities of the Central Province from 2007 to 2020, with the total sample being 490. The employed sequential mixed method includes two analytical tools, namely panel data and vector regression with mactor software;the latter is used to examine the convergence among actors. Six main actors in reducing unemployment are identified, namely Regional Development Planning Agency (Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Daerah/Bappeda), Department of Labor, Department of Education, community leaders;job training center, and Indonesian Chamber of Commerce (Kamar Dagang dan Industri Indonesia/Kadin). The results of the first analysis show that the variables of economic growth, Human Development Index (HDI) and school enrollment have negative and significant effect on unemployment. The results of convergence analysis highlight the importance of the Department of Labor in linking the supply and demand sides of labor in Central Java.
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The port is the basic support for regional economic development and the global allocation of resources. With the rapid development of China's economy and growing ecological awareness, the assessment of port and regional efficiency has received unprecedented attention. In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how the port and its region will be coordinated under the common goal of development has become a hot topic. In this study, the port subsystem (P-subsystem) and the regional subsystem (R-subsystem) are unified into the port–region system (PR system), and a new meta-frontier two-stage data envelopment analysis model is constructed to evaluate the P-subsystem efficiency and the environmental efficiency of the PR system. This research also measures the port–regional coordination level using the coordination index and explores the inefficiency of the PR system with the help of management improvement and technology improvement indices. Main results show that the overall efficiency of the Chinese PR system is increasing. The technological level of the PR system in coastal areas is close to the optimal level. The inefficiency of the Chinese PR system is mainly affected by management inefficiency. The coordination of regional and port development in China is also poor. Finally, on the basis of the research findings, this study provides targeted countermeasure suggestions to promote the efficiency enhancement and coordinated development of the PR system. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd
ABSTRACT
Science and technology parks (STPs) are curated locations where new technology-based firms (NTBFs) and other SMEs and firms can conglomerate and promote a culture of innovation. Overall, the aim is to construct a sustainable high-value tech entrepreneurship ecosystem, and to this end we present here some recent and novel concepts derived from approaches using a data-driven statistical foundation. This paper considers studies on the organic growth of young start-up science and technology parks by authors who have used big data, econometric analyses, panel data and computer simulations. The results and concepts are derived from industrialized countries, notably Sweden and the UK, and may well be applicable to many regions and emerging economies. The findings are of interest to regional development, technology entrepreneurs considering choosing an STP to inhabit, as well as those in STP central teams, specializing in management and enterprise development, including the sustainable growth of new parks.
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Small businesses have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic. We use near-real-time weekly data from the Small Business Pulse Survey (April 26, 2020 - June 17, 2021) to examine the constantly changing impact of COVID-19 on small businesses across the United States. A set of multilevel models for change are adopted to model the trajectories of the various kinds of impact as perceived by business owners (subjective) and those recorded for business operations (objective), providing insights into regional resilience from a small business perspective. The findings reveal spatially uneven and varied trajectories in both the subjectively and the objectively assessed impact of COVID-19 across the U.S., and the different responses to the pandemic shock can be explained by evolving health situations and public policies, as well as by the economic structure and degree of socioeconomic vulnerability in different areas. This study contributes to scholarship on small businesses and regional resilience, as well as identifying policies and practices that build economic resilience and regional development under conditions of global pandemic disruption. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Regional Science Review is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
Motives: Regional passenger airports are an important component of a developed transportation system that reflects the broader development of the region and the country. Due to the small number of studies examining air transport at the regional micro-scale, it is important to carry out a diagnostic of this mode of transport to determine the possibility of regional development. The article presents the reasons for the creation, stages of construction and transformation of selected airports of northeastern Poland. Aim: The main aim of the study was to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the dynamics of air transport development in the area of northeastern Poland. The entire air transport system in the region was analyzed with a detailed inventory of the largest airport Olsztyn-Mazury. Results: As a result of the study, data on the number of passengers and directions of travel for the past six years were compared. It was determined that Olsztyn-Mazury Airport has a significant development potential, providing an opportunity to rebuild passenger air traffic in Warmia and Mazury hampered by the effects of the COVID-19 virus pandemic. © Copyright by Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego w Olsztynie.
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Over the last couple of decades, polar tourism has significantly grown in the number of visitors and diversified in terms of the tourism activities offered. The COVID-19 pandemic brought polar tourism to a halt and has prompted researchers, operators and policy-makers alike to reflect on how Arctic and Antarctic tourism have developed, how they are being managed and governed and, importantly, how tourism operators influence polar socio-ecological systems. Given the dominance of ship-based tourism over other types of tourism in the Polar Regions, we discuss the cornerstones of how polar ship-based tourism has developed over the last 50 years and explore the relevant international and regional governance regimes in this article. We identify which positive and negative biophysical, socio-cultural and economic impacts arising from polar tourism have been identified by researchers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle impacts caused by tourism alone from those that result from the interactions of multiple pressures at all levels (local, regional and global), and more research is needed to develop reliable and effective indicators to monitor tourism impacts. In addition, a better understanding is needed about the role tourist experiences might play in potentially encouraging long-term positive behavioural changes among visitors to the Polar Regions. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an important opportunity to review polar tourism development and management, and to ask whether an emphasis should be placed on ‘degrowth' of the sector in the future.
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Global food security can be threatened by short-term extreme events that negatively impact food production, food purchasing power, and agricultural economic activity. At the same time, environmental pollutants like greenhouse gases (GHGs) can be reduced due to the same short-term extreme stressors. Stress events include pandemics like COVID-19 and widespread droughts like those experienced in 2015. Here we consider the question: what if COVID-19 had co-occurred with a 2015-like drought year? Using a coupled biophysical-economic modeling framework, we evaluate how this compound stress would alter both agricultural sector GHG emissions and change the number of undernourished people worldwide. We further consider three interdependent adaptation options: local water use for crop production, regional shifts in cropland area, and global trade of agricultural products. We find that GHG emissions decline due to reduced economic activity in the agricultural sector, but this is paired with large increases in undernourished populations in developing nations. Local and regional adaptations that make use of natural resources enable global-scale reductions in impacted populations via increased global trade.
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The politics of scale is the main issue within and around debates on whether geographical indications are the best strategy to support local economies. Two PDO cheeses are made in Val Taleggio. While Taleggio PDO has outscaled the valley and its interests, Strachìtunt PDO was reinvented to be at scale for the valley's producers. I explain the two-step transition in the producers' communicative strategy, from a language of heritage cheese and its "prestige” to a multispecies language that stresses the importance of a "working landscape” as a value in itself, focusing in particular on the producers' post-COVID-19 manifesto as "keepers of molds.” Guardianship emerges from it as a new form of authenticity that does not run in the strictures of terroir-discourse. The article thus spells out which role authenticity plays in the politics of scale and how it contributes to the small-scale producers' dilemma of how to craft a future for themselves and their communities. I contextualize this vis-a-vis secondary sources that also stress the conceptual and political creativity of cheese-makers' strategies to revitalize regional (dairy) economies. Food producers are experimenting with new ways of mobilizing heritage to claim guardianship of their trade, craft, and territory. A transnational producer discourse emerges through a redesign of food heritage, front-staging the ecological meaning of craft.
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With the rapid growth of automobile numbers and the increased traffic congestion, traffic has increasingly significant effects on regional air quality and regional sustainable development in China. This study tried to quantify the effect of transportation operation on regional air quality based on MODIS AOD. This paper analyzed the space-time characteristics of air quality and traffic during the epidemic by series analysis and kernel density analysis, and quantified the relationship between air quality and traffic through a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model. The main research conclusions are as follows: The epidemic has a great impact on traffic and regional air quality. PM2.5 and NO2 had the same trend with traffic congestion delay index (CDI), but they were not as obvious as CDI. Both cities with traffic congestion and cities with the worst air quality showed strong spatial dependence. The concentration areas of high AOD value in the east areas of the Hu line were consistent with the two gathering centers formed by cities with traffic congestion in space, and also consistent with the gathering center of cities with poor air quality. The concentration area of AOD decline was consistent with the gathering center formed by cities with the worst air quality. AOD had a strong positive correlation with road network density, and its GWR correlation coefficient was 0.68, then These provinces suitable for GWR or not suitable were divided. This study has a great significance for the transportation planning, regional planning, air quality control strategies and regional sustainable development, etc.
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The Bachelor of Digital Media at Central Queensland University has a policy of offering all units on-campus and online. The introduction of screen production to the degree introduces a unique opportunity to interrogate best practice for delivering production units in this hybrid context. Despite widespread interest in hybrid delivery models due to COVID-19 restrictions, there has been little research into the possibilities of online screen production curriculum beyond the pandemic. In this paper, we interrogate the challenges and opportunities of a hybrid online/on-campus delivery model, arguing that this research is urgently needed to address gaps in access to training and resources for regional and remote practitioners. We outline our contextualised, student-oriented approach to screen production pedagogy, which focuses on designing scalable, equipment agnostic curriculum that encourages a 'total filmmaker' approach;building community and collaboration through online tools;creating robust online unit resources;and providing opportunities for small-group face-to-face activities. Our pedagogical approach challenges the screen production industry's structural barriers and hierarchies, building the capacity of communities to tell their own stories and enabling new voices to emerge. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Media Practice & Education is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)