Regional Hierarchy Research Articles

How Development Economics Can Become 70% More Effective

How Development Economics Can Become 70% More Effective Robert H. Wade (bio) Terutomo Ozawa. The Rise of Asia: The "Flying-Geese" Theory of Tandem Growth and Regional Agglomeration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009 ⋲ 256 pp. For the past two decades the mainstream of the subfield of development economics in the West has been dominated by micro studies in the belief that the top priority is to achieve "rigorous" knowledge about whatever lends itself to being rigorously studied. Before that, from the 1940s through the 1970s, development economists debated big issues of development strategy under headings such as "big push industrialization," "import substitution," "balanced growth," "agriculture versus industry," and "urban bias." Nowadays, in contrast, journals are full of partial equilibrium studies of data sets but are thin on studies of big macro questions, especially of long-run development. The situation is reminiscent of economics before 1936, when economists had elaborate theories for explaining the price of a cup of tea but next to nothing plausible for explaining persistent mass unemployment, and could explain why the bishop was paid more than the garbage collector only in terms of "labour market distortions." When development economists today do tackle big issues of strategy, they tend to prescribe free markets, capital accumulation, and a policy tilt toward export promotion as the keys to rapid economic growth—with an implicit assumption that developing and transitional states are all in the mould of Nigeria and not to be trusted to do virtually anything right. Beyond the distinction between "developing and transitional" and "developed," there is scarcely any analysis of stages of economic transformation. In this context Terutomo Ozawa's new book, The Rise of Asia, is a blast of fresh air. Ozawa starts with the pioneering work of Kaname Akamatsu in the 1930s, who coined the term the "flying-geese" pattern of industrial development. Akamatsu used the metaphor of overlapping V formations of geese to refer to the pattern of quantities of imports, production, and exports [End Page 148] (MPX) in the building of any one industry over time (such as spinning and weaving machinery, electrical machinery, bicycles, and ethylene). This is the intra-industry flying-geese pattern within any one country. Akamatsu also identified an inter-country flying geese pattern between countries in a regional hierarchy, such that as any one industry becomes uncompetitive in one country (perhaps due to rising wages) it moves down the V formation of countries to follower countries with lower wages. Ozawa builds on these ideas and applies them to the period since World War II. Whereas Akamatsu (and just about all of those who used his ideas) pictured Japan as the leader of an Asian hierarchy, Ozawa says this is deeply misleading: the United States was the lead goose and Japan was the lead follower in the 1950s. Without the United States in front, importing huge volumes of consumer goods and then capital goods (and able to run increasing current account deficits thanks to the United States' ability to export its own currency in order to finance imports), there would have been no flying-geese formation in East Asia. From the 1940s to the 1980s and 1990s a fairly linear process of "comparative advantage recycling" operated, in which lower value-added industries moved from one tier of economies to the next (and the leading economies then imported from the newer sites, adding a new imports curve at the end of the standard intra-industry MPX formation). Hence, there existed the following hierarchy: United States > Japan > South Korea/Taiwan/Singapore > ASEAN-4 > China and Vietnam. Since the 1990s, however, the simple flying-geese model has broken down as China has surpassed the ASEAN countries in many industries. Also, since the 1980s and 1990s the value chain for many types of products has become geographically dispersed. Instead of whole industries moving down the country hierarchy to lower wage sites, only the low value-added parts of the value chain move down (such as the production of certain components), while the high value-added parts (such as R&D and marketing) stay at home. Thus, any one middle-wage economy might be moving its center of gravity in a staged sequence across industrial sectors...

What is the problem, exactly? The distribution of Incapacity Benefit claimants' conditions across British regions

There is an entrenched regional hierarchy in the spatial distribution of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants in Great Britain: the ratio of claimants to population is two to three times higher in the ‘North’ than it is in the ‘South’, and whilst some convergence has occurred since numbers stopped growing towards the end of 2003, the gap has changed relatively little. Just as important though, from a practical policy point of view, there is also a marked regional differentiation in the relative importance of the medical conditions from which IB claimants suffer. For example, about one third of males in the ‘South’ are unable to work due to ‘mental and behavioural disorders’, whilst the proportion in the ‘North’ is under a quarter; whilst the converse is true of ‘diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue’. Clearly, as the ‘roll-out’ of Pathways to Work gathers pace with its offer of a ‘condition management programme’ to claimants, and the new regime for those unable to work due to sickness is introduced, those charged with planning and managing the ‘re-activation’ of benefit claimants need to have a more spatially informed understanding of the dimensions of the problem they are to address. This article seeks to help fill this information gap by investigating the cross-regional distribution of conditions and its connection with the cross-regional distribution of claimant numbers.

Megamorfologia e morfoestrutura do Planalto de Borborema

A abordagem morfoestrutural do relevo pode ser definida em diversas escalas levando em consideração aspectos variados da morfogênese. Nesse sentido, este trabalho procura enfatizar a importância dos componentes endógenos sobre a morfogênese da principal unidade do relevo nordestino brasileiro, o Planalto da Borborema. O enfoque morfoestrutural utilizado buscou reconstituir a influência dos mecanismos endógenos atuantes sobre a hierarquização regional dos compartimentos do relevo. A partir dos dados integrados da revisão da literatura, juntamente com o cruzamento em meio digital do mapa geológico com o modelo digital de elevação, acrescido de transectos topográficos, foi possível estabelecer um modelo conceitual para a compartimentação morfoestrutural do Planalto da Borborema, a partir do qual se postulou a divisão do planalto em oito sub-compartimentos morfoestruturais distintos. A partir da compartimentação do planalto o papel dos controles estrutural e litológico foi destacado por meio da elaboração de perfis topográficos que permitiram uma melhor interpretação de cada compartimento e seus elementos definidores. O Planalto da Borborema corresponde ao conjunto de terras altas contínuas que se distribuem ao longo da fachada do Nordeste oriental do Brasil, ao norte do rio São Francisco, acima da cota de 200 metros, cujos limites são marcados por uma série de desnivelamentos topográficos, cuja gênese epirogênica está ligada ao desmantelamento de Gondwana e ao magmatismo intraplaca atuante ao longo do Cenozóico. Do ponto de vista metodológico, a identificação de três níveis hierárquicos de compartimentos morfoestruturais, a saber, o macrodomo correspondente à Província Borborema incluindo suas bacias fanerozóicas, o planalto stricto sensu e seus compartimentos, coloca em dúvida a validade de alguns dos modelos clássicos de taxonomia das formas de relevo, que atribuem apenas um nível categórico para as unidades morfoestruturais supracitadas.

Trans-Border Regions in the System of the Regional Hierarchy: the Systemic Approach

Trans-Border Regions in the System of the Regional Hierarchy: the Systemic Approach

Power Distribution and Oil in the Sudan: Will the Comprehensive Peace Agreement Turn the Oil Curse into a Blessing?

Insights from A.F.K. Organski's work on parity and war provide robust and rich explanatory power in understanding international conflict. Several recent applications of this theoretical structure to sub national groups also demonstrate strong support for a parity conflict relationship between competing domestic parties (Benson et al 1997; Benson and Kugler 1998). In this paper, we demonstrate that this theoretical structure has general explanatory power in identifying the necessary conditions for conflict both between and within states, and serves as a useful tool in forecasting the prospects for conflict or cooperation. We study the regional distributions of capabilities in the Horn of Africa to account for the context of conflict in the Sudan and then evaluate the prospects for peace following the 2011 anticipated referendum on independence established in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Two major findings emerge. The referendum will not affect the regional hierarchy in the Horn of Africa. However, the necessary conditions for conflict do emerge between Northern and Southern Sudan given the referendum, with most of the posited scenarios suggesting the possibility of renewal of the decades long North South conflict.

Renegade Regimes and Global Order

Renegade Regimes: Confronting Deviant Behavior in World Politics. By Miroslav Nincic. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005. 219 p., $22.50. (ISBN: 0-231-13702-8). Renegade Regimes by Miroslav Nincic is a must read study of theory and practice regarding a central twenty-first century security challenge. Nincic shows that political science has much to offer policymakers by providing facts and analysis that explains deviant regime behavior and how that can guide effective policymaking. Renegade Regimes shows that conventional theories of international relations are, alone, insufficient to understanding this primary security problem. Nincic moves beyond the American terminology of “rogue states” arguing that the state is more appropriately thought of as the agent of a regime, which represents the norms that follow from the definition of state interests. Three particular attributes are essential in this context: (1) characteristic methods of rule; (2) characteristic policy goals, and (3) characteristic principles of legitimacy (p. 13). In understanding the relationship between norms and regimes, Nincic asserts that there are limitations to traditional realist assumptions about the content of ideas in the international system—in that there has been a clear agreement that certain norms have become internationalized and thus broadly accepted. To Nincic, power hierarchy matters as the normative content of international relations is established by norm-setters who are at the apex of regional or global hierarchy (p. 21). In seeking to provide context for understanding gross deviations from the accepted global hierarchy of expected behavioral norms, Nincic dispatches with a common assumption—asserting that “deviant regimes are not crazy regimes” (p. 23). Instead, it is best to understand deviant behavior based on four specific assumptions. First, regimes care most about the security of their domestic situation (p. 24). Secondly, there can be either a direct or indirect link between regime position and renegade behavior (p. 25). Third, there are …

Hierarchy and the role of the United States in the East Asian security order

To construct a coherent account of East Asia's evolving security order, this article treats the United States not as an extra-regional actor, but as the central force in constituting regional stability and order. It proposes that there is a layered regional hierarchy in East Asia, led by the United States, with China, Japan, and India constituting layers underneath its dominance. The major patterns of equilibrium and turbulence in the region since 1945 can be explained by the relative stability of the US position at the top of the regional hierarchy, with periods of greatest insecurity being correlated with greatest uncertainty over the American commitment to managing regional order. Furthermore, relationships of hierarchical assurance and hierarchical deference help to explain critical puzzles about the regional order in the post-Cold War era.

How well are women doing? Female non-employment across UK regions

Discussions of the UK's recent labour market performance commonly mention the contrasting trends in the unemployment rate (down), the employment rate (up) and the inactivity rate (flat). These same commentaries also notice that the ‘flatness’ of the overall inactivity rate masks contrasting trends by sex, with male rates (slowly rising) and female rates (slowly falling) and then proceed to discuss male inactivity in some detail before concluding. Bypassing the composition of female inactivity, these commentaries fail to notice that the male and the female proportions of the population not working by reason of sickness or disability are quite similar. Equally they have rarely noticed that male and female non-employment rates display a very similar regional hierarchy with female rates in the ‘North’ as much as 50% higher than those in the ‘South’, and that there is an even steeper North–South gradient in some of the components of non-employment. For example, sickness and disability rates for females in the North are up to 10% of the working age population, while in the South rates are typically less than half that size.

Education, technology, and the ‘new’ knowledge economy: views from Bongoland

The concept of bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world draws symbolically on nineteenth century diffusion theories of linear progress and twentieth‐century theories of modernization and development. This paper examines information and communication technology (ICT) policies and public‐access postings on http://www.bongoland.net. Bongoland evokes a quality of life that is hectic, frustrating, and slightly crazy. Where the language of policies envisions that technology will improve life in Bongoland, users’ postings suggest that technology reinforces regional hierarchies. This essay argues that, despite the disarticulation of past and present at narrative levels in policy, the past and the present emerge as related in Bongonians’ online postings.

Sport, Localism and Social Capital in Rural Western Australia

AbstractWhilst there has been some research conducted on the role of sport in Australian rural communities, to date there has been little detailed discussion by social scientists and geographers on the association between sport and social capital. This paper identifies elements of social capital, at a community and regional social scale, which have been expressed through the activities and adaptive strategies of twenty‐five sporting clubs from the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Most of the adaptive strategies are a direct result of the clubs being exposed to the processes of rural restructuring and include amalgamation and the spatial reorganisation of sporting competition locations. The importance of localism in rural communities is also examined through the issues of trust and distrust within a regional hierarchy context. The paper illustrates how sport is not only an important part of rural life but also an activity which plays an integral role in the formation of bonding and bridging social capital.

P3-175: Cortical column changes due to ageing reflect regional hierarchy and are affected by plaque load

P3-175: Cortical column changes due to ageing reflect regional hierarchy and are affected by plaque load

A proposed regional hierarchy in recovery of post-stroke aphasia

Activation studies in patients with aphasia due to stroke or tumours in the dominant hemisphere have revealed effects of disinhibition in ipsilateral perilesional and in contralateral homotopic cortical regions, referred to as collateral and transcallosal disinhibition. These findings were supported by studies with selective disturbance of cortical areas by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in healthy volunteers and in patients with focal brain lesions. Both, collateral as well as transcallosal disinhibition might be relevant for the compensation of lesions within a functional network. From these data a hierarchical organization of recovery of aphasia after stroke and of compensation of language defects due to brain tumours can be deduced, by which the reactivation of undamaged network areas of the ipsilateral hemisphere usually lead to better outcome than the involvement of homotopic contra-lateral regions. rTMS can be used to identify areas relevant for speech production and might play a role in treatment strategies targeted at modulating the activity of contralateral homotopic areas of the functional network which might interfere with language recovery.

The alterations in CNS serotonergic mechanisms caused by neonatal chlorpyrifos exposure are permanent

Fetal or neonatal exposure to chlorpyrifos (CPF) or related organophosphate pesticides leads to abnormalities of brain cell development, synaptic function, and behavior. Recent studies in rats indicate profound effects on serotonin (5HT) systems that originate during CPF exposure and that are still present at 2 months posttreatment in the young adult. To determine if these changes are permanent, we administered 1 mg/kg of CPF daily to neonatal rats on postnatal days 1–4, a regimen devoid of systemic toxicity, and examined 5HT synaptic markers at 5 months of age: radioligand binding to 5HT 1A and 5HT 2 receptors and to the 5HT transporter. There were global elevations in all three synaptic proteins, with pronounced sex selectivity (effects on males > females) and a regional hierarchy of effects, viz. striatum > midbrain ≈ brainstem > cerebral cortex. Because there is a normal sex disparity for 5HT synaptic proteins, with females having higher values than males, the increase caused by CPF exposure in males completely eliminated this difference. Our findings at 5 months of age replicate those seen in young adulthood and strongly suggest that the effects of neonatal CPF exposure on 5HT systems are permanent.

Excavations at E1 Remolino: Household Archaeology in the San Lorenzo Olmec Region

Studies on the Olmec frequently focus on large centers and monumental works of art, often ignoring the important role of peripheral sites in regional hierarchies. Recent investigations at the Early Formative period (900–1500 b.c., uncorrected radiocarbon years) site of El Remolino help balance this “elite centered” focus by collecting household and community level data at a habitation area away from the regional center of San Lorenzo. Subsurface testing and extensive excavations produced evidence of living surfaces, features, and refuse disposal patterns, which together with phytolith data improve our understanding of a lower order Olmec site. El Remolino was established in the San Lorenzo phase as a permanent settlement whose inhabitants pursued fishing, hunting, gathering, and plant cultivation. The degree to which this site was politically or economically dependent on the elite center of San Lorenzo is unknown.

Знаете, Этнокультуры, Они Ведь Всегда Развиваются…

SUMMARY: The archival publication and the introductory article prepared by two Kazan sociologists present the findings of a research project on a local community of experts on “ethno-cultural politics.” This community includes state officials from the Ministries of Culture and Education of the Republic of Tatarstan (RT); leaders of national and cultural societies officially registered in the RT; members of artistic unions and leading cultural organizations of the RT; and journalists writing about national relations and cultural politics in the RT. Representatives of these four major groups are involved (professionally and institutionally) in the cultural production and implementation of “ethno-cultural” politics at the federal as well as republican level. The discourse of the Tatarstan “expert community” is deconstructed on the basis of 25 semi-formal interviews, extracts from which are published here. The authors point to the absence of any professional language of “nationality politics” and to the defining role of initial professional or bureaucratic discourses for this group. The only common language they have is the language of Soviet ethnicity, which – in the tradition of late Soviet ethnography – strips the concept of “ethnos” of its political connotations and reduces it to tradition and culture. Nationalism in this logic is not connected with the political or territorial claims of some ethnic group, but is seen as a distortion of some “true” ethnic consciousness or as an “ethno-cultural isolationism.” The state remains the major and the only legitimate political subject vis-à-vis the ethnos. The Western concept of multiculturalism and its language and practices are alien to the discourse of this particular “expert community.” The Soviet experience still provides the major frame of reference for them, and Soviet nationalities policies are regarded as multifaceted, containing many positive elements (connected mostly with the role of the state). Thus an uncompromising rejection of the Soviet past is not utilized as a resource for constructing a new “post-imperial” expert identity. The post-Soviet problem of migrants’ integration is rationalized outside the dominant group discourse. The idea of civic citizenship is alien to this group of experts, as they lack the very language to express the concept. They see the major mechanism of “ethno-cultural politics” in the centralized redistribution of state resources and are divided on the issue of the criteria for redistribution. The authors conclude that, in fact, in Tatarstan there is no expert community whose discourse of national politics can be called “professional” and distinguished from other professional or popular discourses. Regional “experts” do not use the symbolic capital that they received by virtue of their institutionalization in the new post-Soviet regional hierarchy. Despite their particular historical circumstances, they do not oppose themselves to any “empire,” and they have not developed anti-imperial (anti-Soviet, anti-colonial) or any other mobilizing “anti-” discourse.

Administration of nicotine to adolescent rats evokes regionally selective upregulation of CNS α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors

α7 Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) play a role in axonogenesis, synaptogenesis and synaptic plasticity, and are therefore targets for developmental neurotoxicants. We administered nicotine to adolescent rats and evaluated the effects on α7 nAChRs in the striatum, brainstem and cerebellum. During the period of nicotine administration (30–47.5 days of age), nicotine elicited α7 nAChR upregulation with a regional hierarchy of striatum>brainstem>cerebellum. Values returned to normal or became slightly subnormal almost immediately after the cessation of treatment (50 days of age) with no further changes through 75 days of age. The temporal and regional patterns of the effects on α7 nAChRs were distinct from those reported earlier for the α4β2 subtype, and neither adult nor fetal/neonatal administration upregulates the α7 subtype in the striatum. Targeting of the striatum is thus unique to nicotine exposure during adolescence and parallels earlier work showing regionally selective effects of this treatment on synaptic signaling. We obtained preliminary evidence for nicotine-induced oxidative stress as a potential contributory mechanism. The present findings reinforce the concept of biologically distinct effects of nicotine in the adolescent brain and provide evidence for a mechanistic involvement of α7 nAChRs in its unique effects during this developmental period.

Retailing Revolution in the Eighteenth Century? Evidence from North-West England

This article explores the extent and nature of retail change in the eighteenth century. In focusing on a single region, it places retailing in its spatial, economic and social context; by adopting different scales of analysis – shop, town and region – it reveals much about the spatiality of retailing. The study shows that retail change had penetrated all aspects of retailing and all parts of the regional urban hierarchy by the end of the eighteenth century. However, any retailing revolution was a patchy and conditional process: the pace of change varied, and the gap between large and small towns apparently widened in the early nineteenth century.

An Approach to Regional Competitiveness

In this paper, we develop a specific method to approach the competitive capabilities of regions for which there are not commercial and specialization indicators available. This method bases on the construction of composite indicators, using multivariate statistical methods, and was applied to the Regiao Centro in Portugal. This allow us to build a regional hierarchy between towns as well as comparative advantages between regions.

A design and implementation of wireless sensor gateway for efficient querying and managing through world wide web

Wireless sensor networks consisting of hundreds to thousands of nodes are expected to find increasing deployment in coming years, as they enable reliable monitoring and analysis of physical worlds. These networks have unique features that are very different from traditional networks, e.g., the large number of nodes, limitation in power. Due to these unique features of wireless sensor networks, their management including querying becomes a challenging problem. In general, it is widely accepted that Web-based management should be used for managing and querying sensor networks. In this paper, we present the architecture of the sensor gateway for Web-based management and its implementation details. We assume that wireless sensor networks have 3-level regional hierarchy, but our gateway is flexible enough to cooperate with other type sensor networks. In addition, to make our gateway process user's query dynamically without intervention of user, a back socket is opened using Java applet. For this purpose, Java script code is embedded in Web page to link Java applet code.

Consolidation and Hierarchy: Chiefdom Variability in the Mississippian Southeast

Explaining variability among Mississippian period (A.D. 1000-1600) chiefdoms has become a key research aim for archaeologists in the southeastern United States. One type of variability, in which simple and complex chiefdoms are distinguished by the number of levels of regional hierarchy, has dominated chiefdom research in this part of the world. The simple-complex chiefdom model is less applicable to the Mississippian Southeast, however, as there is little empirical evidence that chiefdoms here varied along this quantitative dimension. This article offers a qualitative model in which regional hierarchies are distinguished by the manner in which authority is ceded or delegated between an apical or regional chief and constituent, community-level leaders; chiefly power may be ceded from local-level leaders upward to the regional chief or delegated from the regional chief downward to local leaders. This apical-constituent model addresses variation in the administrative structures of chiefdoms: it is not a chiefdom typology. The model is used to contrast two Mississippian polities, Moundville in west-central Alabama and Powers Fort in southeastern Missouri, and illustrates variability in the process by which local communities were integrated into regional institutions.