Regional consultation on enhancing the capacity of Member States to implement anti-stigma programmes in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

[...]the economic downturns, social polarization, public health emergencies, widespread humanitarian emergencies, forced displacement, climate crises, and even COVID-19 are major threats to mental health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. The Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2030 (8), the Regional Framework to Scaleup Action on Mental Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (9), the World Mental Health Report (10), and the associated tools and resources published by WHO provide strategic directions for addressing stigma and discrimination. Recommendations Through outreach activities and advocacy at national and subnational levels, Member States are to strengthen multisectoral partnerships, including with people who experience mental health disorders and their support networks, to leverage scarce resources for mental health and integrate anti-stigma actions into mental health law, policies, and interventions.

CITIES 2022 Preface

CITIES International Conference is an annual international conference organized by the Urban and Regional Planning Department of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS Surabaya). The conference, which debuted in 2005, serves as a platform for academics and practitioners to present, disseminate, and discuss research results in the field of urban and regional planning. Through the efforts of all involved, CITIES has grown from a primarily national conference to one that attracts a diverse, worldwide audience from the Asian, European, Australian, and American continents.CITIES International Conference 2022 will focus on the theme "Future Challenges of the System of Cities”. This theme is important because cities do not grow in isolation, but have interdependent relationships with regions, countries and continents on a larger scale. These relationships must be studied in depth to ensure that urban areas can grow evenly without causing negative effect in the surrounding area. Additionally, this theme also prompts us to examine why production and consumption activities are concentrated or distributed in urban areas of different sizes and compositions. Furthermore, this theme also leads us to explore why the gap between cities, in terms of both skills to income, must be addressed in a measured and careful manner.With this need in mind, CITIES International Conference 2022 is designed to be a meeting place for stakeholders, including academics, researchers, practitioners and bureaucrats, both within and beyond national boundaries. The conference aims to disseminate research results and practical experiences at local, national and global levels, and to share insight and recommendations on improving the quality of city system in the future.CITIES International Conference 2022 was organized in collaboration with the World Planning School Congress (WPSC) and the Asian Planning School Association (APSA) as a joint congress from August 30th to September 2nd, 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions caused by high numbers of cases, especially in Indonesia, the event was held virtually using the Zoom platform.List of Sponsor Funding Acknowledgements, Committees, Rundown Cities International Conference 2022 "Future Challenges of the System Of Cities”, Conference Photograps are available in this Pdf.

Narratives on COVID-19 Effects on Coworking Spaces in France: A Winning Ticket for the Peripheries?

France, like other European countries, has not been spared the COVID-19 crisis, but this pandemic, unknown in the twenty-first century, has highlighted and served as a sounding board for many other issues, both in society and in the materiality of contemporary cities. A new territorial narrative has emerged around the following question: can coworking spaces, and more generally third workplaces, meet the needs of a French society that is looking for planning solutions in the face of successive emergencies, in favour of better territorial equality and individual well-being? To assess the growth of coworking in France and its territorial impact—real, potential, or symbolic—the authors refer to their own research in the Centre-Loire Valley region and to specialized literature on economics and regional planning. © 2023, The Author(s).

Community Resilience Assessment and Identification of Barriers in the Context of Population Aging: A Case Study of Changchun City, China

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.

Creative Economy and Sustainable Regional Growth: Lessons from the Implementation of Entrepreneurial Discovery Process at the Regional Level

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.

Preface

International Conference on Geospatial Science for Digital Earth Observation (GSDEO 2021)The international conference on "Geospatial Science for Digital Earth Observation” (GSDEO) 2021 was successfully held on a virtual platform of Zoom on March 26th and 27th, 2021. The conference was jointly organized by the Indian Society of Remote Sensing (ISRS), Kolkata chapter, and the Department of Geography, School of Basic and Applied Sciences, Adamas University. Due to the non-predictable behaviour of the COVID-19 second wave, which imposed restrictions on organizing offline events, the GSDEO (2021) organizing committee decided to organize the conference online, instead of postponing the event.Remotely sensed data and geographic information systems have been increasingly used together for a vast range of applications, which include land use/land cover mapping, water resource management, weather forecasting, environmental monitoring, agriculture, disaster management, etc. Currently, intensive research is being carried out using remotely sensed data on the geoinformatics platform. New developments have led to dynamic advances in recent years. The objective of the international conference on Geospatial Science for Digital Earth Observation (GSDEO 2021) was to bring the scientists, academicians, and researchers, in the field of geo-environmental sciences on a common platform to exchange ideas and their recent findings related to the latest advances and applications of geospatial science. The call for papers received an enthusiastic response from the academic community, and over 100+ participants from 50+ colleges, universities, and institutions participated in the conference. In total 50+ research papers had been presented through the virtual Zoom conference platform in GSDEO 2021.The conference witnessed the presentation of research papers from diverse applied fields of geospatial sciences, which include the application of geoinformatics in geomorphology, hydrology, urban science, land use planning, climate, and environmental studies. There were four sessions namely, TS 1: Geomorphology and Hydrology, TS 2: Urban Science, TS 3: Social Sustainability and Land Use Planning, and TS 4: Climate and Environment. Each session was further subdivided, into two parts, namely Technical Session 1-A and 1-B. Each sub-session had been designed with one keynote speech and 5 oral presentations. Oral sessions were organized in two parts and offered through live and pre-recorded components based on the preference of the presenters. The presentation session was followed by a live Q&A session. The session chairs moderated the discussions. Similarly, poster sessions were organized in three parts and offered e-poster, live, and pre-recorded components. The best presenter of each sub-session received the best paper award.Dr. Prithvish Nag, Ex-Director of NATMO & Ex Surveyor General of India delivered the inaugural speech, and Dr. P. Chakrabarti, Former Chief Scientist of the DST&B, Govt. of West Bengal delivered a special lecture after the inaugural session. Eight eminent keynote speakers, Prof. S.P. Agarwal from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Prof. Ashis Kumar Paul from Vidyasagar University, Prof. Soumya Kanti Ghosh from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Prof. L. N. Satpati from the University of Calcutta, Prof. R.B. Singh from the University of Delhi, Dr. A.K. Raha, IFS (Retd), Prof. Gerald Mills from the University College Dublin and Prof. Sugata Hazra from Jadavpur University enriched the knowledge of participants in the field of geoinformatics by their informative lectures. The presentations and discussions widely covered the various spectrums of geoinformatics and its application in monitoring natural resources like vegetation mapping, agricultural resource monitoring, forest health assessment, water, and ocean resource management, disaster management, land resource management, water and climate studies, drought vulnerability assessment, groundwater quality monitoring, accretion mapping and the use of geospatial sci nce in studying morphological, hydrological, and other biophysical characteristics of a region etc. Application of geoinformatics in predicting urban expansion, urban climate, disaster management, healthcare accessibility, anthropogenic resource monitoring, spatial-interaction mapping, and, sustainable regional planning were well-discussed topics of the conference.List of Committees, photos are available in the pdf.

Tourism promoting sustainable regional development: focusing on rural and creative tourism in low-density and remote regions

This study, based on the analysis of the existing bibliography, as well as the result of the appreciation of a low-density and remote case studies located in the Azores Archipelago, seeks to identify a theoretical nexus regarding rural and creative tourism and regional sustainable development in the post-COVID-19 scenario. In this regard, the authors applied analytical descriptive and inductive deductive methods. Contextually, the study aims not only to understand the subject in more prominent detail but also to clarify new tendencies, approaches, and potential guidelines that allow the actors implicated to design and drive sustainable regional development in the long term. The remote and low-density territories are the most appealing destination for this new tourism dynamics. Also, the paper shows that it is possible to establish that in this ultra-peripheral territory, the tourism sector was already presuming relevance in 2019, benefiting from a large sample of entrepreneurs and actors in the tourism sector in the Portuguese Autonomous Region of the Azores. Some potential implications may include the following: (i) Increased economic benefits: Creative tourism can bring in additional revenue for local businesses and organizations and individual artists and craftspeople;(ii) Preservation of cultural heritage: Creative tourism can help to support and preserve traditional cultural practices and crafts, which can be an essential aspect of island communities' identity;(iii) Job creation: Creative tourism can create new job opportunities for locals, such as tour guides, workshop instructors, and artists.

Analysis of environmental performance and interactivity of ports and regions

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

Planning for Emerging Infectious Disease Pandemics

Problem, research strategy, and findingsPlanners have not paid enough attention to managing the risk of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), of which COVID-19 is the most recent manifestation. Overlooking aggressive policies to manage this risk of zoonotic viruses reassorting between sick animals and humans misses the greatest opportunity for stopping future disease pandemics. In this study we review several disciplines, outline the scant planning literature on EIDs, and identify the increasing calls from virologists and medical professionals to address urbanization as a key EID driver. Using the case of avian influenza outbreaks in Vietnam in 2004 and 2005, we conceptualize a preventive planning approach to managing the risk of zoonotic transmission that results in EID pandemics.Takeaway for practiceWe make several recommendations for planners. Practicing planners should consider how their plans manage the risk of zoonotic disease transmission between animals and humans through land use planning and community planning. Planning education and certification organizations should develop positions regarding the role of planning for EIDs. Food systems planners should consider the importance of livestock practices in food production as a risk factor for EIDs. Diverse research teams should combine geographic scales, data sources, and disciplinary knowledge to examine how an extended series of upstream and downstream events can result in a global pandemic. Such empirical examination can lead to effective planning policies to greatly reduce this risk.

Developing Young Science and Technology Parks: Recent Findings from Industrial Nations Using the Data-Driven Approach

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.

Tendency of older adults to leave big cities in the COVID‐19 pandemic: A qualitative regional analysis in Turkey

This study investigates how territorial and age group disparities in implementing COVID‐19 measures in Turkey triggered some of the older adults living in those regions to move to rural settlements and small towns. The direction of this mobility was from urbanized regions to rural regions. Data is collected from 201 older adult participants nationwide through longitudinal qualitative research. A combination of purposive and snowball sampling techniques was used to form the sampling of the research. Chi‐squared test was applied to the collected data and significant correlation values are found between the age groups and the main motives for them leaving the big cities. Findings show that this mobility caused unexpected problems for older adults and contributed to the spread of the virus, but represents a counter‐urbanization tendency in Turkey.Alternate :Este estudio investiga cómo las disparidades territoriales y por grupos de edad en la aplicación de las medidas para COVID‐19 en Turquía provocaron que algunos de los adultos mayores que vivían en esas regiones se trasladaran a asentamientos rurales y pequeñas ciudades. La dirección de esta movilidad fue de las regiones urbanizadas a las rurales. Se recogieron datos de 201 participantes adultos mayores de todo el país a través de una investigación cualitativa longitudinal. Para obtener la muestra de la investigación se utilizó una combinación de técnicas de muestreo intencional y de bola de nieve. Se usó el test estadístico de Chi‐cuadrado con los datos recogidos y se hallaron valores de correlación significativos entre los grupos de edad y los principales motivos de abandono de las grandes ciudades. Los resultados muestran que esta movilidad causó problemas inesperados a los adultos mayores y contribuyó a la propagación del virus, lo que representa una tendencia contraria a la urbanización en Turquía.Alternate :抄録本研究では、トルコにおける新型コロナウイルス感染症対策の実施における、地域や年齢層による相違が、どのように当該地域に住む高齢者の一部が農村集落や小さな町に移住するきっかけとなったのかを検討する。この移動は、都市化された地域が起点で農村地域が終点であった。データは、縦断的な定性的研究において、全国の201名の高齢者の参加者から収集されたものであった。本研究のサンプリングは、目的のあるサンプリングとスノーボールサンプリングの方法を組み合わせて実施した。収集したデータを、カイ二乗検定により分析したところ、年齢層と大都市を離れる主な動機との間に有意な相関を示す値が認められた。知見から、この移動が高齢者に予期せぬ問題を引き起こし、ウイルスの拡散の一因となったことが示されるが、これはトルコにおける反都市化の傾向を表している。

Road Development Risks and Challenges in the Philippines

The Philippines, as a fast-growing country, has had the highest road infrastructure investment to date for the past five years compared to the previous years. The infrastructure programs of the government as a solution to decongest Metro Manila and develop the countryside for economic growth are promising yet result in various risks and challenges. This research presents the road development issues from multiple sources;primary data from interviews of stakeholders of road development, secondary data from online news articles, social network services, government issuance, policies, and related literature. The Philippines is in a dire economic situation due to the Covid-19 outbreak that resulted in the country's worst economic performance since the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The country's economic managers pinned high hopes on the government infrastructure programs as a vital strategy to help pump-prime the economy towards recovery due to its job generation and multiplier effects. Hence, it implicates enormous risks and challenges such as low tax revenues, the trade-off with more urgent Covid-19 response measures, foreign and private companies support, unsolicited project proposals, inequitable distribution of infrastructures, and delays in construction activities. Various road development stakeholders also mentioned the need for strict road regulations, urban and regional planning, aesthetic improvement, urban renewal in aid of car-centric infrastructures, and routine maintenance on-road sections. The data are structured in various categories such as public involvement, environmental preservation, public policy, project planning, road design, road safety, economic recovery, and construction time. Lastly, the implications for future research directions are discussed. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Rebuilding the Capabilities for Post COVID-19 Pandemic: Issues and Challenges of Bangalore Model of Development

The pace of urbanization has achieved considerable momentum in recent years with 34.93 per cent of India's population living in urban areas. However, the COVID - 19 pandemic has severely affected urban development with adverse effects on people's mobility, consumption level, health and poverty. Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka and the third largest city in India, has a population of 11 million and contributes more than one third of the state's GDP. The expansion of certain sectors including Information Technology, infrastructure and spread of educational institutions has fueled Bangalore's rapid growth in the past three decades which has made it a regional superpower in India, if not South Asia. This paper explores the unique features of the 'Bangalore Model of Development' as a regional development model and provides a systematic introspection of its capabilities. It discusses the impact of the pandemic on the key driving forces of Bangalore Model and assesses the current government measures. The situation analysis with the policy prescriptions would help to strengthen and sustain the urban system during the postpandemic times. © 2022 IEEE.

Road Development Risks and Challenges in the Philippines

The Philippines, as a fast-growing country, has had the highest road infrastructure investment to date for the past five years compared to the previous years. The infrastructure programs of the government as a solution to decongest Metro Manila and develop the countryside for economic growth are promising yet result in various risks and challenges. This research presents the road development issues from multiple sources;primary data from interviews of stakeholders of road development, secondary data from online news articles, social network services, government issuance, policies, and related literature. The Philippines is in a dire economic situation due to the Covid-19 outbreak that resulted in the country's worst economic performance since the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The country's economic managers pinned high hopes on the government infrastructure programs as a vital strategy to help pump-prime the economy towards recovery due to its job generation and multiplier effects. Hence, it implicates enormous risks and challenges such as low tax revenues, the trade-off with more urgent Covid-19 response measures, foreign and private companies support, unsolicited project proposals, inequitable distribution of infrastructures, and delays in construction activities. Various road development stakeholders also mentioned the need for strict road regulations, urban and regional planning, aesthetic improvement, urban renewal in aid of car-centric infrastructures, and routine maintenance on-road sections. The data are structured in various categories such as public involvement, environmental preservation, public policy, project planning, road design, road safety, economic recovery, and construction time. Lastly, the implications for future research directions are discussed. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Effect of Transportation Operation on Air Quality in China Based on MODIS AOD during the Epidemic

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.

Creative Tourism in Islands and Regional Sustainable Development: What Can We Learn from the Pilot Projects Implemented in the Azores Territory?

The current need for territories and societies to grow is based on the Sustainable Development Models as well as the United Nations (UN) Agenda for 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In that case, such new forms of tourism development imply creating and upgrading critical infrastructures, facilities, equipment, or differentiated activities to bring clients who align with the desired Sustainable Development Models and SDGs. In this regard, the thematic literature provides evidence that some tourism typologies (nature-based, rural, culturally-based creative tourism) play a critical role in attaining sustainable regional development. Therefore, this paper aims to unfold what can be learned from the pilot projects implemented in the Azores region aimed toward the so-desired regional sustainability. Contextually, the obtained results ask for the regional leaders to consider encouraging entrepreneurship associated with small and medium-sized firms;fostering the diversity of touristic offerings;designing guidelines that follow sustainable development models and the SDGs;or creating meaningful investments in the conservation and protection of cultural heritage, as well as the Azorean endogenous resources.

Desafíos y oportunidades en una metrópolis contraurbanizada. Movilidad regional en tiempos de COVID-19

In a profoundly unequal metropolis, daily mobility strategies allow the development of interpersonal assistance and support networks, as well as access to strategic resources/services that secure an adequate quality of life. According to this premise, I explored the increase in socioeconomic/health vulnerability and conflicts that emerged from mobility restrictions for containment and prevention of COVID-19 infections in the Metropolitan Region of Córdoba (Argentina) during 2020. I analyzed statistics, technical studies and press testimonials to characterize the socio-functional structure of the region, its daily mobility patterns and how the latter were transformed due to those restrictions. Finally, I characterized its impact on people's quality of life. The results show that the contradictions between those restrictions and the daily mobility patterns (structured by counter-urbanization and daily swaying migration that characterize the region) aggravate existing vulnerability and create new risks that affect the entire population, but specially the most impoverished groups, youth and women. This affirms the importance of incorporating regional daily mobility as a strategic factor in the development of effective, sustainable and inclusive health policies. © 2022 Universidad Nacional de Colombia. All rights reserved.

Spatial structure and influencing factors of regional city supply networks in manufacturing: A case study of Shandong, China

COVID-19 has driven the formation of regional supply chains. In addition, cities became the basic units of intra-regional supply chain organization under urban administrative economies. Based on the data mining of the buyer-supplier relationship of listed manufacturing firms, this study explores the spatial characteristics of city supply networks within Shandong by the indexes of degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and a community detection algorithm using the social network analysis (SNA) method and ArcGIS software. It investigates the influencing factors of city supply networks by the correlation and regression of the quadratic assignment procedure (QAP). The results show the following: 1) Shandong has formed a multi-center city supply network with Jinan, Qingdao, Yantai-Weihai, and the distribution pattern of city centrality measured by different centrality indicators shows differences. 2) Cities belonging to the same network community show a coexistence of spatial proximity and "enclave” distribution. 3) Geographic proximity, convenient transportation links, administrative district economy, similarity of business environments represented by development zones, export-oriented or domestic market-oriented division of labor between cities, value chain division of labor between cities, and land price differences between cities promote the formation of regional city supply networks. Conversely, differences in local market size and wage levels between cities hinder the formation of city supply networks. This study attempts to apply the analysis results to regional planning from the perspective of regional industrial synergy development. Additionally, as it is based on typical Chinese provinces, it can provide policy references for national administrative regions and countries/regions at similar spatial scales for manufacturing supply chains, as well as for regional spatial layout decisions of manufacturing enterprises. Copyright © 2023 Yan, Wang, Zhao and Zhang.

Promotion of entrepreneurship through business incubators: Regional analysis in Spain

This study focuses on business incubators in Spain, which helps compare regions within Spain. This study has four goals: to shape taxonomy of the Spanish business incubator system, to compare between regions, to identify the factors affecting incubators' success, and to analyse during the COVID pandemic. Of the 478 business incubators registered in Spain, 89 were selected as the sample for study. Business incubators provide office space, equipment and mentoring services, as well as financial, legal and administrative support for entrepreneurs and start-up companies. Non-parametric statistical techniques are used to compare between regions, considering each regional business incubator as an ecosystem. The study focuses on six Spanish regions: Madrid, Catalonia, Castile-Leon, Aragon, Basque Country and Galicia. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Fuzzy AHP approach to evaluate incentive factors of high-tech talent agglomeration

To compete with the speedy revolution of high technological innovation and restarted economy for the post-COVID-19 period in China, governments and organizations should be active in attracting high-tech talent to enhance independent and indigenous R&D capability. Talent agglomeration effectiveness is the strongest endogenous force pushing competitiveness for regional economy and industrial development. Due to the complexity of high-tech talent agglomeration, there are still considerable gaps to evaluate the incentive factors. This study evaluates the influential indicator system by using a hybrid fuzzy set theory extended Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach for proximity to reality from individual, organizational and environmental dimensions. The statistical analysis is adopted to verify the results of fuzzy AHP analysis. This research explores the founding that individual incentives are more important than environmental factors, and environmental incentives are more influential than organizational incentives. Job satisfaction, welfare system, and geographical location are the highest ranking factors. High-tech start-ups should give priority to combine geographical location with political support to reserve site selection or firm relocation for a great effectiveness of high-tech talent agglomeration. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd