Economic Shrinkage Research Articles

Micro-Museum Quarter as an Approach in the Culture-Led Urban Regeneration of Small Shrinking Historic Cities: The Case of Sombor, Serbia

Demographic and economic shrinkage has become a common trend in the current urbanisation environment, especially for small cities in developed countries. The desired socio-economic redevelopment of these cities has been significantly affected by the functional, organisational, financial, and professional constraints caused by both shrinkage and city size. Paradoxically, this slow development has enabled better preservation of their historic cores, urban heritage, and traditional culture. Nevertheless, the aforementioned local constraints have a profound impact on sustainable urban regeneration, and successful examples are still quite rare. This research presents an inspiring case—a small museum quarter in Sombor, Serbia. Museum quarters are a relatively new concept in culture-led urban regeneration; all known examples are located in big cities. Hence, this research tries to create an innovative methodological link between two theoretical fundaments: the role of cultural heritage in shrinking small cities and its expression through a museum quarter as one of the concepts of culture-led urban regeneration. An analytical framework for the aforementioned single case study is derived by forming this link. The main findings underline that the museum quarters in shrinking small cities should be developed in a micro-format to rationally address and the limited local resources. Furthermore, in contrast to museum quarters in big cities, they should be physically detached from the main retail street to enhance their separate identity and should be internally balanced in both spatial and functional aspects, meaning that the key museum/cultural institutions are equally dispersed throughout the quarter and clearly interconnected by a pedestrian-friendly open public space.

Spatial Distribution and Influencing Factors of Urban Shrinkage from the Perspective of Factor Flow - A Case Study of National Urban Agglomerations

This paper examines national urban agglomerations by taking factor flows as the focal point as the researchsubject. By dividing the stages of urban agglomeration development, a comprehensive framework of urban shrinkage is constructed, encompassing economic, population, and social shrinkage. The study explores the spatial distribution characteristics of urban shrinkage during different stages of urban agglomeration and investigates the influencing factors using a geographic detector model. The findings reveal that urban shrinkage within urban agglomerations is widely spread, predominantly in peripheral areas. During the diffusion stage, urban shrinkage is scattered, with population shrinkage concentrated in peripheral regions, economic shrinkage concentrated on old industrial cities, and social shrinkage concentrated on the northeast. The outcomes of the geographic detector model indicate that traffic flow, capital flow, information flow, node importance, network connectivity, government investment, openness, and environmental regulations all play significant roles in shaping the spatial distribution of urban shrinkage.

Examining the impacts of military expenditures on economic productivity: a system dynamics approach

The relationship between military expenditures and economic productivity has taken the attention of many researchers and there exist an important number of studies approaching the topic through several techniques. However, there is no consensus among the scholars whether military expenditures trigger economic growth, productivity, and other macroeconomic indicators. Such arguments are mainly due to unclear results obtained from the existing studies, in which the complex relationships between military expenditures and macroeconomics are not fully incorporated. Considering the bidirectional and nonlinear relationships among macroeconomic indicators and complex feedback mechanisms, a system dynamics (SD) model for examining the impacts of military expenditures on economic productivity in Turkey is proposed. The proposed SD model aims to reflect the complex environment surrounding the military spending–economic productivity nexus and to analyze the feedback structures that lead to miscellaneous consequences with delays. A stock–flow model is developed to represent the complex nonlinear relationships and causalities between the variables. Data from SIPRI, the World Bank, and several local statistical sources covering the years 2009–2018 are utilized to simulate the existing case, warfare in neighbors, economic shrinkage scenarios, and the combination of the latter two. The results obtained from the scenarios suggest that short fixes such as importing military products instead of national investments give rise to chronic issues like continual dependence on foreign supply, hence, leading to decrease in overall economic growth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate SD methodology with military expenditure and economic productivity analysis.

Spatial-temporal evolution pattern of multidimensional urban shrinkage in China and its impact on urban form

The scientific recognition of urban shrinkage patterns and their impacts is crucial for urban economic development and building harmonious relationships between people and the environment. This study, through the construction of a multidimensional evaluation system for urban shrinkage, provides a systematic analysis of the spatial patterns and evolution of urban shrinkage in China from 2000 to 2020, and examines the effects of urban shrinkage on the evolution of urban form. The findings suggest that: (i) The trend of urban shrinkage in China is worsening, with shrinking cities primarily located in the peripheral areas of growth poles and the northeast region, often exhibiting a simultaneous shrinkage in population, economy, and society; (ii) Urban shrinkage, especially population and economic shrinkage, has a growing influence on urban form, leading to a reduction in the speed and scale of urban land expansion and a decrease in the number of urban patches; (iii) There is a spatial mismatch between the level of urban shrinkage and urban form indicators, particularly in some cities where a paradox of population loss, economic decline, and urban land expansion coexist. This contradiction severely violates the laws of urban development and poses a threat to the construction of new-type urbanization.

Regions of Central Russia in the Context of Demographic and Economic Shrinkage and Polarization

Regions of Central Russia in the Context of Demographic and Economic Shrinkage and Polarization

Impact of COVID-19 on the Supply Chain of the Food Industry: A Literary Analysis

The devastating impact of COVID-19 on different business functions cannot be undermined. This effect was highly disruptive for the food industry where a number of businesses closed down whilst a significant number of businesses had gone bankrupted. Considering this stance, this study explored the impact of COVID--19 on the supply chain of the food industry which was also the objective of this study. The research opted for interpretivism paradigm and qualitative research approach, following which literary analysis of the previous studies conducted within this domain was compared and analyzed. Findings of the study identified that COVID-19 directly hindered the food industry's supply chain in the times of seasonal employment where most of the migrant workers were unavailable due to sickness, lockdown restrictions, or any sort of travel restrictions. Besides that, streamlining and managing the flow of food ensuring that all the stages of the supply chain in the food industry are completed effectively was identified as another key challenge. Likewise, economic shrinkage and reallocation of resources paralyzed the economy of many countries and, hence, hindered governmental institutions' capacity to provide financial incentives to the companies. In addition, logistical efficiency was also affected due to prolonged lockdown, devastating the fine-tuned schedule and causing disruption in the food supply chain. Therefore, many foodproducing companies either closed their operations or had to reduce their production or operational capacity, which further resulted in increased demand, less supply, and less sales or profitability of the food businesses. it is recommended for the food businesses to consider restructuring their business models specifically related to progressive investment in the domain of supply chain. Companies need to foster collaboration among different actors or stakeholders of supply chain including an integration of raw material supply, manufacturing of food products and a streamlined chain of their supply in the market.

Poverty prevalence and negative spillovers in Sub-Saharan Africa: a focus on extreme and multidimensional poverty in the region

PurposeThe paper analyses the prevalence of extreme and multidimensional poverty in line with the sustainable development agenda. In addition, the paper examines the drivers of extreme poverty while accounting for the potential spillover effect of poverty in the region.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts the pooled OLS with Discroll-Kraay robust standard errors to control for cross-sectional dependence. In addition, given the strong potential for endogeneity of poverty index, the authors also employ the generalized method of moments (GMM), which accounts for simultaneity and endogeneity problems, and the spatial error and lag models to control for all forms of spatial and temporal dependence since the factors that affect poverty disperse across borders.FindingsThe study finds that in addition to the traditional drivers of poverty (unemployment, low per capita GDP growth and public debt), poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is a symptom of a deeper structural problem (lack of access to water and sanitation, high level of corruption and low level of financial development, and frequent economic busts). Likewise, the results from the spatial econometric specification show, consistently across all the specifications, that there is a substantial spillover effect of poverty across the region.Originality/valueThe main novelty of the paper is that the authors investigate the “economic shrinkage hypothesis,” and examined the potential negative spillover effect of poverty in the region.

Demographic and economic aspects of urban shrinkage in Serbia - typology and regional differentiation

Urban shrinkage is a process that many European countries have been facing in recent decades. It had started in highly developed regions at the time of deindustrialisation, but since the 1990s, this process has also affected Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe, with different patterns and dynamics of urban shrinkage. The political and economic crisis in Serbia during the 1990s, as well as the transition from a centrally governed and urban-based industrialisation to a neoliberal market economy, has brought significant changes in the development of cities, which faced declining demographic and economic vitality. This paper is focused on the analysis of the intensity and dynamics of demographic and economic aspects of urban shrinkage in Serbia and on classification of cities according to the different phases of urban shrinkage. Typological classification was performed using the K-means clustering algorithm. The cluster analysis is based on the use of relevant demographic and socio-economic indicators, for the period from 2002 to 2011. After identifying cities that recorded an increase in total population and relatively stable economic development, three types of shrinking cities were determined according to the intensity of demographic and economic shrinkage - cities with low, medium and high shrinkage intensity. The analysis of the main patterns and factors that influenced the different levels of urban shrinkage enabled a better understanding of this phenomenon in Serbia. The results indicate the heterogeneity of urban space due to different levels of demographic and economic shrinkage, thus it can serve as a starting point for future research of uneven urban development in Serbia.

The Forced Cancellations of Four Selected Annual Sport Events (ASES) Due to COVID-19 and Its Socio-Economic Influence on South Africa: A Literature Review

During the first three months of 2020, the world was struck by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This resulted in governments around the world to adopt interventions aimed at containing and mitigating outbreaks of COVID-19. In a South African dispensation, the national government followed suit with the rest of the world which led to the halting and/or slowing-down of economic operations, particularly after enforcing a national lockdown. The foregoing resulted in the cancellation and/or postponement of events, including that of annual sport events (ASEs). Notwithstanding the South African President’s acknowledgement of potential economic shrinkage due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore the possible socio-economic influences that forced cancellations of four selected ASEs might have on the country, albeit from a theoretical vantage point. This conceptual study was non-empirical and exploratory in nature; utilising a qualitative research approach. An extensive literature review was conducted which resulted in the analysing of secondary data, allowing for the study to fall within the interpretivist research paradigm. Considering the trends noted, it is highly probable that the forced cancellations of the selected four ASEs will have a significant adverse influence on South Africa, particularly from a socio-economic stance. As such, this study lays a framework for future empirical investigations pertaining to inter alia the exact adverse socio-economic influences of forced ASE cancellations due to COVID.

Africa: COVID 19 and the Future of Economic Integration

As part of the Global agenda 2030 for sustainable development and agenda 2063 as Africa aspires to fulfill a major development objective, the current breed of African leaders after (re)democratization in the 1990s, have shown greater commitment to adopting and implementing decisions for regional/economic integration as a common strategy for the development of the continent. Thus, in 2018, 44 countries signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AFCFTA) in Kigali.Nevertheless, the novel COVID19, since it revealed its ugly head has had disruptive impacts on world economy. Sub Saharan Africa also suffers from these global economic effects and thus, amidst COVID19, the region will see economic growth reverse and plunge to between -2.1% to as low as -5.1%.The economic shrinkage will cost Sub-Saharan Africa between $37 billion to $79 billion in lost output in 2020 due to a sharp decline in output growth. Therefore, can African countries achieve this development path of integrating their economies amidst the COVID19? What remain the prospects for Africa’s current commitment towards economic integration? Within this paper, I argue that, although and somewhat the future prospects for Africa’s economic integration remain uncertain and blur due to the destabilizing effects of the COVID19 on individual African economies; Yet, the sense of urgency of the current global crisis would translate into adding impetus to accelerate growth: first, an opportunity to re-think macro-economic policies; second, the COVID19 has further revealed the vulnerability of African economies and thus, will provide a strong signal to African leaders and significantly adding an incentive to initiating full and concrete measures to ensure economic integration.

Street lighting and the uneasy coexistence of socialist and capitalist urban imaginaries

This essay examines the partial privatization of street lamps in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany. Founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, East Germany’s steel manufacturing hub and socialist utopia, today the city suffers from economic shrinkage and depopulation. In 2014, Eisenhüttenstadt’s government privatized approximately 10% of the city’s street lamps, a response to both the city’s shrunken tax base and to the Energiewende, Germany’s national push toward renewable energy, which has led to the precipitous rise of consumer energy costs. I examine privatized street lamps within the broader context of Eisenhüttenstadt’s technological and sociopolitical development. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I show how, during the socialist era, street lamps were an essential instrument in the construction and conceptualization of socialist urban space. Since privatization, they have come to signify the fractured and radically individualized nature of capitalist urban space. As such, I reveal how socialism—and the rupture caused by its abrupt replacement with capitalism—remains present and perceptible in the urban landscape, and how that presence poses challenges for urban planners and municipal officials working in Eisenhüttenstadt today, 30 years after East Germany’s dissolution.

Mobility and social exclusion in peripheral regions

ABSTRACT Mobility largely depends on public services and constitutes a key factor for regional development. However, demographic and structural changes challenge public transport networks in peripheral regions and lead to economic shrinkage. This, in turn, undermines the principle of creating or maintaining equal living conditions across Germany and leads to spatial polarization. Limited mobility is closely connected to social exclusion and warrants an in-depth analysis. Our paper examines the commuting patterns of apprentices in rural Brandenburg, Germany. It is based on a survey of apprentices in tourism and the food industry. The study finds that apprentices in rural areas are confronted with public transport deficits but also apply strategies for dealing with these problems. The paper also shows how this relates to social exclusion and to current planning debates regarding co-production and digitalization in the context of public service provision.

Assessing local-scale inclusive wealth: a case study of Sado Island, Japan

Present trends of urbanization are accompanied by increasing demographic and economic shrinkage of rural regions. In countries such as Japan, these rural regions trail behind metropolitan counterparts according to GDP, the conventional measure used to guide governmental policies. Yet, past research suggests that these regions may be undervalued. Further, the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI), largely only used at the national level, may be able to capture aspects previously missed. As such, our study attempts to highlight the wealth of rural regions by comparing the inclusive wealth of Sado Island and Japan between 1990 and 2014. Minor methodological modifications were made according to data availability at the local level and to improve the accuracy of human capital estimations. Results captured the ongoing shrinkage of Sado and demonstrate the distinct potential of the IWI as a stock measure. Sado’s per capita wealth was about 10% lower than the national averages, but its natural capital was about threefold national averages. Supplementary estimations of the natural capital of fisheries and cultivated forests suggest that inclusion of additional factors in the evaluation would further increase the relative valuation of rural regions. We discuss implications of our estimations for wellbeing, and conclude with a critical appraisal of the IWI calculation towards policy implementation of the index.

Start-up urbanism: New York, Rio de Janeiro and the global urbanization of technology-based economies

This article investigates the variegated urbanization of technology-based economies through the lenses of a comparative analysis looking at New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Over the last decade, the former has gained a reputation as a ‘model tech city’ at the global level, while the latter is an example of emerging ‘start-up city’. Using a Marxist-Foucauldian approach, the article argues that, while technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s arose from the late Keynesian state, the globally hegemonic phenomenon of start-up urbanism is illustrative of an increasingly decentralized neoliberal project of self-governing ‘enterprise society’, mobilizing ideas of community, cooperation and horizontality within a context of cognitive-communicative capitalism in which urban environments acquire renewed centrality. In doing so, the article underlines start-up urbanism’s key contribution to the reinvention of the culture of global capitalism in times of perceived economic shrinkage worldwide and the central role played by major metropolitan centres in this respect.

Coal Mine Based Circular Economy Park: A Case Study

With decades of development and exploitation of coal resources, the first batch of coal-based cities in China are faced with the challenge of economic shrinkage and environment deterioration due to the rapid resource exhaustion and single industrial structure. Nowadays, as a policy instrument for sustainable development, a nationwide circular economy mode has been implemented during the design and planning of new coal mines to address the challenges arising from economic depression, energy shortage and environmental pollution. It should be mentioned that several national coal bases and most of constructing and planning coal mines are located in the underdeveloped areas in the Midwest of China which means that the distance between supply source for energy resources and the demand market is significantly increased. Moreover, the eco-environment vulnerability in these rural areas should be taken into serious consideration. Therefore, after comparison and analysis with several successful coals based and diversified circular industry chains, this paper presents a case study on the circular economy park (CEP) in the northwest of Shanxi Province. Through discussion and evaluation of ‘1+3’ mode in the CEP, this paper aims to enhance the understanding of coal mine sustainable development and shed light on the relationship between resources exploitation and local economic development.

The Road to Debt Deflation, Debt Peonage, and Neofeudalism

What is called “capitalism” is best understood as a series of stages. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, which has passed through pension fund capitalism since the 1950s and a US-centered monetary imperialism since 1971, when the fiat dollar (created mainly to finance US global military spending) became the world’s monetary base. Fiat dollar credit made possible the bubble economy after 1980, and its substage of casino capitalism. These economically radioactive decay stages resolved into debt deflation after 2008, and are now settling into a leaden debt peonage and the austerity of neo-serfdom.The end product of today’s Western capitalism is a neo-rentier economy — precisely what industrial capitalism and classical economists set out to replace during the Progressive Era from the late 19th to early 20th century. A financial class has usurped the role that landlords used to play — a class living off special privilege. Most economic rent is now paid out as interest. This rake-off interrupts the circular flow between production and consumption, causing economic shrinkage — a dynamic that is the opposite of industrial capitalism’s original impulse. The “miracle of compound interest,” reinforced now by fiat credit creation, is cannibalizing industrial capital as well as the returns to labor.The political thrust of industrial capitalism was toward democratic parliamentary reform to break the stranglehold of landlords on national tax systems. But today’s finance capital is inherently oligarchic. It seeks to capture the government — first and foremost the treasury, central bank, and courts — to enrich (indeed, to bail out) and untax the banking and financial sector and its major clients: real estate and monopolies. This is why financial “technocrats” (proxies and factotums for high finance) were imposed in Greece, and why Germany opposed a public referendum on the European Central Bank’s austerity program.

Should degrowth embrace the Job Guarantee?

Degrowth should consider the right to work – a Job Guarantee (JG) – as a way of making a smaller economy more just and socially sustainable. Economic shrinkage in richer countries is accompanied by increased unemployment, a bad enough problem in itself but also a barrier to voters’ acceptance of the degrowth path. Since being out of work is distinct from being poor, anti-poverty income policies should be approached separately. The JG is one of several paths to full employment, including reduced working time. This essay only briefly mentions some real-world JG programs and some technical objections. The main suggestion is to move employment from being a matter of economics, particularly economic growth, to being a political right. A right to work is necessarily effective and would avoid sacrificing the ecological and social goals of degrowth on the altar of full employment.

Spatial self-preference: On the limits of place marketing to attract new residents and firms

Worried about demographic and economic shrinkage, more and more cities and regions in Europe invest in place marketing. With campaigns, they try to seduce new residents and firms to settle in their community. In this article, we question the usefulness of such ‘cold’ place marketing by referring to geographical insights and recent empirical evidence from the Netherlands. In fact, data on migration flows clearly demonstrate the geographical inertia of citizens and companies. Contrary to popular thinking, Dutch residents and firms do not easily move – they show a lot of spatial self-preference resulting from a strong sense of place and/or location-specific capital. Although this article mainly deals with the Dutch situation, we suggest that, in general, place marketing will be of limited use to acquire in-migrants and new firms. Therefore, we plea for ‘warm’ place marketing that starts with the needs of a community's existing residents and entrepreneurs. In the end, we think, pleased locals are a place's best ambassadors.

Green space development in shrinking cities – opportunities and constraints

Many cities in Eastern Germany are aff ected by processes of demographic and economic shrinkage (Hannemann, 2003; Gatzweiler et al., 2003): (1) Demographic processes mean changes in the size and structure of the population. Lower fertility rates have been causing the absolute population to drop. A rising level of life expectancy has lead to demographic aging. Additionally, internal migration has resulted in regional population decline. Meanwhile, immigration and changing lifestyles have made populations more international and heterogeneous. (2) Deindustrialisation in Eastern Germany has led to economic problems and has also resulted in declining budgets of the local authorities. (3) Loss of population and economic downturn have brought about a fall in the demand for housing, commercial property and social infrastructure buildings, thus creating a surplus. The increasing number of vacancies calls for the demolition of buildings, producing more empty spaces and transforming the urban fabric. Concurrent suburbanisation and changes in land-usage have reduced the spatial density of shrinking cities.

Resorts, Culture, and Music: The Cape Breton Tourism Cluster

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada saw rapid growth in heavy industry at the turn of the 20th century. The industries were in severe decline by the 1960s. To stabilize economic shrinkage as a result of job losses in coal and steel, the federal government, through two Crown corporations, developed strategies to create a fully stratified tourism cluster. The research examines the growth of the tourism cluster in Cape Breton, noting early investments in infrastructure, large-scale programmes to attract private investment, recognition of the role of cultural tourism and the development of a segmented marketing programme.