Yuko Akune (p)

This paper aims to examine spatial spillover and local effects of regional resources for food manufacturing productivity in Japan. Over a few decades, food manufacturing has emerged as a leading industry that stimulates regional economies, especially in rural regions where agriculture is a primary industry. This analysis assumes that food manufacturing productivity depends on local industrial environments of municipalities as regional resources; market conditions, vertical industrial linkages, research and development (R&D) stock, and local historical industrial environments. At the beginning of the analysis, spatially lagged dependent variables were confirmed using Moran’s I statistics and tests for spatial autocorrelation, Lagrange Multiplier (LM) and robust LM tests. Then, four spatial econometric models were examined: a spatial lag model, a spatial error model, a spatial simultaneous autoregressive model, and a spatial Durbin model (SDM). The SDM was the most suitable and appropriate model out of the four models. In the SDM, we found spatial spillover and local effects of regional resources for food manufacturing productivity. Three variables were significant with regard to both direct and indirect impact: income level as the market condition, industrial linkage with wholesale and linkage with retail as vertical food manufacturing linkages. These stimulate the enhancement of food manufacturing productivity, not only within municipalities but also in neighboring areas. In other words, these results indicate that these variables have spatial spillover. Additionally, the results, wherein coefficients of indirect impacts are higher than those of direct impacts, show that neighboring municipalities are influenced more than within their own municipalities. On the other hand, five variables had significant direct impacts, rather than indirect impacts: R&D food manufacturing stock, linkage with agriculture, and all three variables of historical agglomeration as local historical industrial environments. These results showed that these regional resources have limited effects; that is, they work as enhancements of food manufacturing productivity only within their own municipalities, whereas they do not exert any significant influence on productivity outside their municipalities. These resources have local effects on food manufacturing productivity.

Luca Andriani (p), Andrea Filippetti , Pier Paolo Angelini

The overall decline of the civic participation in the Western democracies has been raising serious concerns among academics and policy makers especially given its generally recognised importance for institutional and economic performance. Explanatory factors of civic engagement proposed so far mainly focus on trust and institutional quality, ethno-linguistic diversity and new forms of digitalised civic participation. However, there is a lack of mapping possible changes in civic participation across the space and along different socio-economic dimensions, essential to shade light on the phenomenon. In light of this background, we conduct, to our knowledge, a first spatial analysis of civic engagement in major urban areas. We consider three major Italian cities: Rome, Milan and Naples. These cities present different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds as well as distinct urban geography allowing a quasi-experimental comparative analysis. This approach becomes even more crucial considering the increasing phenomenon of “sorting” in the western democracies: citizens increasing trend to sort (cluster) along the dimensions of income and education across the space within the cities. Our research questions are:
1) do more homogenous spaces – in terms of income and education – exhibit higher levels of civic engagement in the Italian cities?
2. do we observe a divergence in civic engagement, leading to higher participation of the wealthy and more educated and lower participation of the poor and less educated?
The analysis uses secondary geocoded data from the 2014 Italian Participation Labour Unemployment Survey sampling 55,000 individuals, stratified over the Italian population aged 18-64. Civic engagement is measured in terms of individuals’ involvement in voluntary activities. Explorative spatial data analysis techniques will test the existence of spatial clustering along the dimensions of income and education. Spatial autocorrelation indexes and regionalization algorithms will identify the existence of clustering, its extent, and the mapping of neighbourhoods sorted around homogeneous characteristics of income and education. Through a bivariate LISA, we will test whether more homogenous spaces exhibit higher or lower levels of civic engagement Finally, we will investigate spatial dependency of civic engagement on socio-economic factors through a Geographical Weighted Regression approach which generates parameters disaggregated by the spatial units of analysis.
The outcome of our analysis will provide important insights for policy makers informing policy to enable more appropriate urban planning concerning urban areas regeneration and socio-economic redistribution of resources in view of a more consistent cultural and socio-economic integration among different social layers.

Jose A. Belso-Martinez (p), F. Xavier Molina-Morales

During the last decades, an academic consensus has been reached on the innovative intensity that characterizes the most dynamic clusters. Policy makers have not remained unaware of this reality. There are many programs designed to promote from the internal R & D of the companies to the implementation of new organizational solutions. Although aspects such as the design of these actions or the evaluation of their impact have been investigated, their side effects or derived from their overlap remain unexplored. In this sense, this work studies the indirect effects on the exchange of knowledge between companies of two programs for the promotion of the internal innovation of the company. The empirical evidence obtained in the biotechnological clusters of Alicante and the analysis of social networks confirm the existence of these side effects. The results suggest the need to assess the undesirable impact of designing or implementing cluster innovation promotion programs.

Hadiseh Hosseini Jahanabad (p)

Assigning the routes to arrive the destination points, was the main contacting acts in human life. In this manner routes have the first role of connectivity between the settlements. Social and commercial interaction are occurred by transport systems, gathering of links and nodes. Roads link settlement areas to have more activity with other urban and regional areas. Cities within the transport systems as nodes, have influenced by development of trade and connectivity functions by passing time. In this paper tries to evaluate relationship between the trade activity that cause agglomeration of people, and urban network during history that appeared within the Anatolian territory as one of the main settlements area in the world. By using the historical resources and maps that created by using the GIS program. Besides, this study presents the transformation of the cities and urban networks of Anatolia during this transformation. According to the different regional trade activities, settlements through these corridors affected. Especially after growth of economy and cross border deals, commercial relationships among the cities and international trade have great changes. The main research is that influences of trade on Anatolian cities and their networks. These result led to have further research on Anatolian trade routes as first trade corridor around the urban networks in the world.