Angelika Krehl (p)

Antonio Garcia-Sanchez

This paper provides an overview of current work on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), urban spatial structure and land scarcity. Reasons to pursue research on the interplay of KIBS, urban spatial structure and land scarcity are not only ongoing spatial and economic restructuring processes but also a seeming underrepresentation of the resource ‘land’ within these discussions. Thus, it is first explicated how KIBS are conceptualized and operationalized in different settings. Second, the economic underpinnings of the current urban spatial structure and its relationship to KIBS are discussed. Third, land scarcity in urban regions is addressed because land (availability and/or scarcity) is expected to affect both the current urban spatial structure and the development of KIBS within a region. The paper reveals that KIBS and urban spatial structure are at times considered together, whereas land availability (scarcity) is usually addressed separately. Based on this finding, the prospects of a more integrated discussion of economy (KIBS, urban structure) and environment (land) are illustrated – approaching the question how to make urban regions both economically and environmentally sustainable. The paper ends with exemplary empirical analyses that could be pursued in future research.

Adaku Jennifer Agwunobi (p)

Antonio Garcia-Sanchez

For many people, being an entrepreneur is a goal in life in itself, necessity (in developing economies) and/or means to escape labour market discrimination, however at times, well-being can be negatively affected by being an entrepreneur. I offer the concept of intersectionality to explain why and when this is true. Individual entrepreneurs with combined characteristics deemed to be of lower standing or incompatible with the role of the entrepreneur, are likely to have reduced well-being as an entrepreneur. This is enhanced in circumstances where the individual is more amenable to compare themselves with others, such as when they are digital entrepreneurs. In this short conceptual paper, I further develop this concept and discuss the circumstances when intersectionality impacts well-being particularly within digital entrepreneurship - recommending mixed methods analysis for future research. Intersectional entrepreneurship can be a means of improving the lives of the entrepreneur in question, their team and their communities but overall, a knowledge gap exists. The contribution is three-fold, offering a conceptual framework linking three areas as a guidance for future research, offering a novel conceptualisation of digital entrepreneurship in relationship to intersectionality which encourages age as a key intersectional indicator often ignored and lastly, an exploration of narratives of well-being in entrepreneurship literature.

Julio Gustavo Fournier Gabela (p)

Antonio Garcia-Sanchez

Policy questions at the sub-national level are usually answered by multi-region frameworks which capture spatial spillover and feedback effects arising from them. Although several estimation methods exist for approximating inter-regional, inter-sectoral flows at the sub-national level, the gravity approach continues to be the most popular one. However, it is not exaggerated to state that applied regional studies using this data have ignored space arguments other than distance and thus have remained blind to advances in the gravity literature. This work gives empirical evidence of this by first briefly reviewing the gravity literature and then testing two popular gravity specifications with help of the survey-based 2005 Inter-regional Input-output table published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) of Japan. Since the latter is disclosed in three different sectoral disaggregation levels, a sensitivity analysis is also performed. Results are judged by means of a mean average percentage error indicator and analyzed from a general, sectoral and regional perspective, each of them assessing model's accuracy and sensitivity to the sectoral scale and showed only a very good fit of the simplified gravity model, whereas the second one heavily distorts flows, where even a random number generator combined with a RAS process would perform better. The regional assessment of the results shows that the first model, although being accurate for sectors, highly distorts estimates for several region pairs. Regarding sensitivity to the sectoral disaggregation level, results show only a moderate total error increase, but a puzzling finding is that larger change-of-scale differences do not correspond to the higher disaggregation case. From a regional perspective it is found that most of the differences occur when going from the 12-sector to the 29-sector versions.