Wen-Jung Liang (p), Yi-Jie Wang

Abstract

1. Objective
It is characterized in a spatial framework that online shopping is location-irrelevance, which can save transportation costs for consumers, while suffering a distaste cost due to goods purchased online unable to be inspected beforehand. By contrast, the brick-and-mortar firms bear transportation costs but incur no distaste cost.
Guo and Lai (2016) adopt a Hotelling’s linear city model and show that entry of an online firm will force the surviving brick-and-mortar firms to move toward the left urban areas while the online firm will occupy the right rural areas. Unfortunately, Guo and Lai (2016) are unable to explain the real phenomena of the brick-and-mortar firms’ location choices when online purchases incur high distaste costs, which cause low-cost physical stores to locate in the urban area while high-cost physical stores in the rural area. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to employ a barbell model to investigate the brick-and-mortar firms’ location decisions in response to the entry of an online firm.

2. Method
Consider a barbell model, in which two distinctly asymmetric markets, one highly demand (densely populated) market denoted as the urban area and one lowly demand (loosely populated) market denoted as the rural area, locate at the opposite endpoints of the line segment with unit length, respectively. No consumers are residing inside the line segments. There are two cost asymmetric brick-and-mortar firms and one online firm producing a homogeneous good engaging in Cournot competition.
The game in question is a two-stage game. In the first stage, the two brick-and-mortar firms simultaneously select their locations. In the second stage, given the location decisions, all firms simultaneously choose their quantities.

3. Results
First, provided that the online firm’s distaste cost is high, the brick-and-mortar firms will move their optimal locations from separation to agglomerate at the urban market when the urban market is medium and the less efficient firm’s marginal cost is low, while they will switch from agglomeration to take apart at different markets when the urban market is large and the less efficient firm’s marginal cost is sufficiently high. Next, given a low distaste cost, the brick-and-mortar firms will change from agglomeration to take apart at different markets when the urban market is large and the less efficient firm’s marginal cost is low, while the less efficient firm will be driven out of the markets when its marginal cost is sufficiently high.

Aisling ConwayLenihan , Helen McGuirk (p)

Regional economic development has long been acknowledged as an important objective of government policy, though the type and scope of such development is less recognised. In particular, the value of the ocean and coastal regions as a driver of economic development, until recently, is far less understood. The focus of the current research is to measure the economic activities associated with the Marine Leisure Industry and the impact on the local economy. Analysis is based on data from the Cork Harbour region. Located in the southwest coast of Ireland, this region boasts the second largest natural harbour in the world and the second largest shipping port in Ireland. The analysis includes activities such as the level of direct and indirect employment, the contribution from local users and visitor to the region, and the capacity to expand the industry in the region.
The research established a multiplier specific to the industry, one which has the potential for use in analysis beyond the Irish case. Cork Harbour has 1,035 annual resident moorings and 555 resident berths. The direct expenditure generated by the industry is approximately €6.8m from both residents and visitors. Based on the multiplier of 1.60, the Marine Leisure Industry in the Cork Harbour region is estimated to account for approximately €11m of output supporting 29 direct jobs and 290 indirect jobs.
With potential to grow berthing capacity, the region has real opportunities to increase the economic impact of this indigenous industry for the city, its hinterland and beyond. Our findings challenge policymakers not only to consider creating an enabling environment for the industry to flourish and to promote investment, but to recognise this industry’s contribution to regional development.

Kyle Farrell, Peter Nijkamp (p)

A defining feature of the contemporary urban narrative is the unprecedented pace and scale of the urban transition unfolding in developing countries. A growing subset of research attributes this to changes in the contribution of the components of urban growth – rural to urban migration, urban natural population increase and reclassification of rural areas as urban. Consequently, this has presented new patterns of urbanization that no longer fit neatly into the classical conceptualizations that have come to dominate the established theoretical discourse. In an attempt to advance our understanding of the contemporary urban transition, this paper puts forward a more nuanced account of the urban narrative unfolding in developing countries. It does so by empirically examining the urban transition in China, Nigeria and India between 1950 and 2010; these three countries will account for the largest increase in urban population over the coming decades. Taking advantage of standardized datasets consisting of remotely sensed data made available by the e-Geopolis Project, this paper performs a number of spatial and statistical techniques that are commonplace in the field of urban economics. In doing so, it arrives at several notable findings. Firstly, the unprecedented pace and scale of the contemporary urban narrative can be explained by the varying contributions of the components of urban growth; with rural to urban migration serving as the dominant component in China, whereas urban natural population increase is dominant in Nigeria and India. Secondly, during periods where reclassification was at its highest, national urban systems became more spatially balanced, while the rank size distribution became uneven. Thirdly, the spatial configuration of the population, reflected by the national settlement pattern, is an evolving process influenced by the components of urban growth. In China, this meant that rural to urban migration led to the faster growth of large cities along the eastern coastline; in Nigeria, natural population increase led to the growth of large and medium sized cities in the south; and in India, reclassification led to a significant rise in small towns throughout the country. Ultimately, this paper attempts to go beyond the assumption that the urban transition follows a uniform pattern, and instead advances the notion of a multitude of urbanization trajectories. The findings of this paper have implications for national urban policy.

Oana Mihaescu (p), Niklas Rudholm , Diana Hovsepyan

External trade is usually no major threat to downtowns in medium and larger cities, as the population is sufficiently large to support several marketplaces and downtowns have enough resources (money and ideas) to diversify and innovate and thus stand strong in the face of the threat posed by new edge-of-town shopping centers. But many smaller cities in Sweden have problems with a declining and aging population and thus lack of human capital that overlaps with a shortage of financial resources that does not give downtowns the same possibilities for development.

The retailing and hospitality industry play an important role in the creation of an attractive urban environment and are often the key to downtown urban renewal. However, we know very little about how these industries interact in smaller cities around Sweden. In addition, we know a little about how the external trade actually affects companies in the trade and hospitality industry in these cities.

Our paper is thus aimed at describing the role that the retailing and hospitality industries have for the attractiveness of downtowns in smaller cities and at analyzing how investment in external trade areas close to small towns affect the retailing and the tourism industry in the downtown. We are using a sample of 76 small cities in Sweden together with all firms in retailing and tourism industries located in these cities. We are comparing developments in city centers versus external trade areas, the city as a whole, and the respective municipality by means of firm productivity indices that we calculate in a first step of the analysis. We are then using regression analysis (difference in difference estimations) in a 20-years longitudinal setting to determine the effect of large external trade areas on the firms in the retailing and tourism sectors in the downtown areas. Our paper attempts thus to identify the characteristics of small cities in Sweden that have positive developments in spite of the establishment of these external shopping centers on their outskirts.