Process Of Cumulative Causation Research Articles

Macroeconomic competitiveness in the Europe of the Twelve: An application to 1969–93

This study offers an integrated view of the relationships between technology, trade, and economic growth. Inspired by the most recent neo-Schumpeterian and post-Keynesian proposals, an empirical model is constructed to analyze how technology affects trade, how trade determines the evolution of gross domestic product, and how this economic growth can increase the technological capacity of nations, reinitiating the virtuous circle of growth. The model is estimated using the new technique of simultaneous equations with panel data. The results provide great support for the technological gap trade theory and for the existence of Kaldorian cumulative causation processes in the Europe of the Twelve during the period 1969 to 1993.

Migration and Labour Market Adjustment: Empirical evidence from Finland 1985‐90

This paper addresses the question of the role of migration as an adjustment process by analysing the relationship between unemployment and labour force mobility. The empirical analysis deals with long-distance migration in Finland in the period 1985-90. When considered within a multivariate setting in which personal and place characteristics are held constant, the results show that higher origin unemployment rates increase outmigration, but not particularly for unemployed workers. Three outcomes are deduced from the results. First, the equilibrating process of interregional migration is slow-although working in the right direction-and becomes steadily slower as regional unemployment differentials fall. Secondly, the size of high-unemployment regions, as measured in terms of the labour force, decreases during the adjustment process as employed persons also leave the region. Thirdly, high-unemployment regions in particular lose their young and educated workers. The danger of the process of cumulative causation is great in these regions.

Investment and regional development in Post-Mao China

This paper investigates China's changing investment systems, investment patterns and their impact on regional development. It reveals that the reforms have brought profound changes to Mao's investment system and investment allocation. Investment decentralization has given localities considerable autonomy and incentives in economic development. Budgetary investment has declined dramatically while enterprise funds, bank loans and foreign investment have increased significantly in China. An increasing amount of these new sources of fixed investment have been channeled to more profitable non-state sectors. In terms of regional changes, China's coastal provinces, particularly Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang have recorded more rapid investment growth and have much higher per capita investment than many interior provinces. In addition, investment in the coastal provinces relies less on the state and is more profitable than that in the poorer interior. The sectoral and regional unevenness of fixed investment has significantly contributed to the uneven regional development in China. This research also has important theoretical implications, as it shows that regional investment is neither a cumulative causation process nor a convergent process, but influenced greatly by government policy, local states and local conditions, and foreign capital. An analysis of these factors should improve the understanding of investment allocation and regional development, especially for the transition economy in which the control and capacity of the central state has declined, while local and global forces have emerged as equally important forces shaping spatial change.

Agency culture, cumulative causation and development in Glacier National Park, Montana

Glacier National Park, Montana, and its transmountain road exemplify two critical factors in park management; the role of public demands and agency culture in policy-making, and a self-perpetuating domino effect of development. The National Park Service and the public have developed a culture of beliefs including the public's right to park access, the beneficial effects of the wilderness experience, the need for an educational program in the parks, and the propriety of the automobile to bring about these goals. Following these convictions, the Park Service at Glacier constructed a popular transmountain road which initiated a process of cumulative causation. In this process each infrastructural addition encouraged more use which in turn demanded more infrastructure. The roles of agency culture and cumulative causation have implications for national parks and reserved areas worldwide.

Black/Immigrant Competition Re-Assessed: New Evidence from Los Angeles

This paper reports on a survey of employers to assess the impact of immigration and employer practices on black employment chances in Los Angeles. We observe a process of cumulative causation in which a set of mutually reinforcing changes raise barriers to the hiring of blacks. Network hiring seems to have a dual function, bringing immigrant communities into the workplace, while at the same time detaching vacancies from the open market, thus diminishing opportunities for blacks. Employers also perceive immigrants as far more desirable employees than blacks, in part, because they expect that immigrants will be the more productive workers, in part, because they also see immigrants as more tractable labor. Any managerial propensity to favor immigrants is likely to be reinforced by the attitudes of the predominantly Latino workforce, as inserting a black worker in a predominantly Latino crew is not a technique for increasing productivity, given the hostility between the two groups. And African-Americans seem to play their own role in this process, apparently opting out of the low-level labor market in response to rising expectations, on the one hand, and the anticipation of employment difficulties on the other.

The "Orderliness" of Economic Development (Presidential Address)

The process of economic development-in the sense of a sustained increase in per capita income-is typically associated with dramatic changes in some key economic variables relating to the sectoral composition of production, trade, and factor-use. And this seems to suggest that it is essentially a "disorderly" affair. Some of these changes have been observed regularly enough to qualify as the stylised facts, or the "regularities", of economic development. These general observations about the real world seem to support a spate of "disorderly" hypotheses about the nature of economic development. The critical minimum-effort hypothesis, the poles-of-development conjecture, the unbalanced-growth strategy of development, the propositions advocating a big-push, the great spurt, or the process of cumulative causation, all suggest that the development process may have been disequilibrating in the "structural sense" . Yet another dimension of such "disorderly" hypotheses is the pioneer's vision of the effects of growth on income distribution. Thus Lewis's "capital fundamentalism" envisages a particularly "bloody" scenario: capital accumulation proceeds relentlessly in his dual-economy model, where profits rise while real wages remain constant because the supply of labour-the Marxian "reserve army"-is (definitionally) elastic. In Lewis's model, if not in the real world, the story of (capitalist) growth comes to an end once the real wage starts to rise; this must happen because, again by definition, the wage-earners consume all that they earl}. Kuznet's and also Myrdal's inverted U-shaped pattern of inequality-partially confirmed by cross-country investigations of the size distribution of income-postulates a worsening of income distribution, at least in the initial stages of economic development.

The spatial contribution to income inequality in rural China

An income function analysis is conducted of the 2,400 (rural) counties of China, using cross-section data. Income inequality among counties is considerable and accounts for the major part of inequality among rural households in China. County income per capita is well explained by province, terrain, agricultural type, location, and the relative importance of non-agriculture. Non-agricultural activity, in turn, is strongly assisted by agricultural success. An analysis of time-series data suggests that a process of cumulative causation operated in the decade after the rural reforms of 1978, increasing spatial inequality in rural investment, industrialization, and income. Fiscal redistribution from richer to poorer areas weakened the process but failed to stem it. Copyright 1993 by Oxford University Press.

Irrigation reform in conditions of populist anarchy: An Indian case

It is true that the performance of India's canal-irrigated agriculture could be substantially and cheaply improved by change in canal operating and maintenance procedures. But current procedures allow some farmers and state officials to capture disproportionate benefits for themselves through a well-institutionalised system of corruption. These beneficiaries of the status quo make up powerful interes groups against reform. The paper illustrates just how intensely ‘political’ irrigation reform can be, by tracing what happened when an attempt was made to carry out an apparently simple improvement in water allocation rules under a South Indian canal. The events suggest a wider process of cumulative causation making for low rates of growth of food production and weaker political authority. The process is not inevitable, however, and the paper ends with some suggestions about how, in the irrigation context, public policy might help to offset the decline.

POLARIZATION REVERSAL IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

POLARIZATION REVERSAL AND THE SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS In a recent fugitive, though reasonably well-circulated paper [21] I coined the term polarization reversal (hereafter PR). Although this clumsy inelegant phrase is merely a new name for a well-known, if underresearched, spatial phenomenon, it seems to have fired the imagination of some observers of spatial planning in developirlg countries for it has already aroused some comment and analysis [11], [14], [15], [20]. It seems appropriate to begin a dialog with these commentators and to elaborate the significance and meaning of the concept. There are no research results presented here; the paper is intended as a stimulus to research. PR may be defined as the turning point when spatial polarization trends in the national economy give way to a process of spatial dispersion out of the core region into other regions of the system. This definition requires elaboration by placing PR in the broader context of a descriptive theory of national spatial development. The urbanindustrial process of national development begins in one or two regions only, primarily because of the scarcity of investment resources. The choice of regions is determined by initial location advantages (resource endowments, or a key immobile resource such as a port) or because it was the first area opened up from outside (and this eventually converts into the greater market size of the excolonial primate city). This initial start becomes a cumulative causation process explained by increasing returns to scale and the consequent polarization of labor and any surplus capital from other regions. The core-periphery relationship is thus established (see page 77), where the core region consisting of the primate city and its hinterland dominates the rest of the space economy, called the periphery. This periphery is dominated by the core and dependent on it, and its rate of development is controlled and distorted so as to further the core's economic interests. At a more advanced stage of development, a spatial transformation begins to occur within the core region. The population and agglomeration of economic activities in the primate city become so large that a monocentric spatial structure becomes inefficient and costly. Congestion costs and rising land values induce some economic activities to decentralize to satellite centers within the core region. These centers may intercept new migrants who are attracted by job opportunities expanding at a more rapid rate than in the primate city. But this intraregional decentralization does not count as PR, because the core region (including the primate city) continues to grow at a faster rate than the rest of the country.