Statehood: A politico-geographic and legal perspective

The political geographical literature of focuses on the State yet little attention has been placed on the basic criteria and attributes of statehood. This paper presents a linked politico-geographic and legal perspective on statehood. The criteria and attributes identified and discussed are: a particular defined territory; a permanent resident population; a constituted effective government; independence; sovereignty; recognition; permanence; the capacity to enter into relations with other States; a State apparatus; a circulation system; and an organized economy. Certain conceptualizations and the importance of discourse are discussed.     

Institutional change and natural resource use in coastal Vietnam

Vietnam is currently undergoing a rapid economic and social transition involving the dismantling of the co-operative system and the official embracing of a market economy. The paper uses an institutional approach to examine adaptation to such changes in two coastal communes in mangrove forest areas. Having provided the historical and policy context of reforms which have taken place in Vietnam in the area of resource management, the paper goes on to discuss changes currently taking place in access to resources. The complexity of property rights regimes are then examined in the light of such changes, with particular focus on the effects of privatisation and the increased effects of integration with external markets. Using livelihood diversification as a key concept for understanding local adaptation to such changes, the paper concludes with discussion of the socially differentiated impacts of the process and the implications for future livelihoods. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Spatial change and economic organisation: The Tyneside coal industry (1751–1770)

Concepts of economic power and organisation are rarely considered by historical geographers in their attempts to explain change in space economies. In this paper an attempt is made to use these concepts to explain and understand the changing geography of the Tyneside coal industry from 1751 to 1770, a time when the industry was dominant nationally. At the beginning of the period the Tyneside industry was itself dominated by a monopolistic group, the Grand Allies, a dominance partly maintained through control over the use of land. Their dominance was broken by a combination of technological and economic developments as exploited by a competing group of capitalists based on the emerging banking system. The monopoly of the Grand Allies was broken but replaced, in a more developed form, by the Limitation of the Vend, and by 1770 the geographical and economic structure of the industry had changed dramatically. Underpinning this changing geography was the interaction of social and political structures, including the interdependence of enterprises with a developing political economy. It is in this interaction that the understanding of change in space economies must be sought.     

Economic reforms and the New Master Plan of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Implementation issues and policy recommendations

The economic reforms or `doi moi' introduced in 1986 have transformed Vietnam's planned economy to a more market-oriented one. Rise in international capital, market liberalisation and greater population mobility have contributed towards a greater concentration of squatters in the city centre, and extended metropolitan development in the fringes of Ho Chi Minh City. Rapid urbanisation and, to a lesser extent, industrialisation have converted large tracts of farmlands to urban use, and greater rural exodus. Such dramatic changes have drawn the city government's attention to face the new challenges. As a very important political and economic centre in the south, Ho Chi Minh City has prepared for itself a new Master Plan, approved in 1997, to provide a legitimate and institutional framework to guide its future spatial development. This paper introduces the background and explains the rationale behind the drafting of the Master Plan, and highlights the constraints that are expected in implementing it. The administrative framework in planning is also examined in terms of its advantages and disadvantages in a planning system with four levels: national, provincial, district and local. Land availability in the city centre, source of funding and technical expertise are all parts and parcels of the challenges in the process of modernising HCMC to accommodate the need of its residents and rapid global change. Ho Chi Minh City's strong relationships with its hinterlands have equally required the planners to look at the planning field using the whole national and regional scenarios. Policy recommendations aimed at improving the implementation capability are finally presented. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cultural political economy: On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology

This article explores the implications of making the cultural turn in the engagement of economic and political geography with issues of political economy. It seeks to steer a path between a fetishistic, reified economics that naturalizes economic categories and a soft economic sociology that focuses on the similarities between economic and other socio-cultural activities at the expense of the specificity of the economic. We show how combining critical semiotic analysis with an evolutionary and institutional approach to political economy offers one interesting way to achieve this goal. An evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis enables us to recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as establishing how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized; and Marxian political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. The paper illustrates these arguments with a case study on the Flemish ‘anchoring strategy’ as a specific regional economic development strategy. It concludes with a set of guidelines for the further development of cultural political economy.     

矿权的生产与经营--论地勘单位的改革与发展

矿权及矿权市场的建立,为地勘行业的找矿成果进入市场搭建了平台,矿权的生产与经营是国有地勘单位最具优势和竞争力的产业发展方向,商业性地质工作是地勘单位获取利润的重点,按市场经济的要求,以企业为主体,以局为单元,以效益为目的,地勘行业在社会经济发展中大有作为。     

Privatization of rural industry and de facto urbanization from below in southern Jiangsu, China

At the heart of China’s economic transformation from plan to market is the institutional rearrangement of the ownership of property rights. Privatization of collectively owned township and village enterprises (TVEs) in recent years has significantly changed the rural economy and affected small town development in China. Located mainly in villages and small towns and producing 62% of the total industrial output in Jiangsu in 1994, TVEs played a crucial role in southern Jiangsu (Sunan)’s economic development and urbanization, giving rise to the well-known “Sunan model” of regional development during the 1980s. Since the mid-1990s, ownership transition (zhuanzhi) of the TVEs from collective to private in Sunan has altered the nature of the regional economy and the pattern of small town development. The privatization of TVEs in Sunan has been so pervasive that it can be seen as the “second industrial divide” in the region’s economy. This paper traces the evolution of ownership reform in Sunan’s rural industries leading to the current phase of privatization and analyzes the effects of privatization on de facto urbanization from below in Sunan. Given the importance of privatization, continuous scholarly monitoring of its relationship to regional economic development and urbanization from below is necessary.     

An institutional analysis of the evolution of inland waterway transport and inland ports on the Pearl River

Inland waterway transport (IWT) is the most appropriate means of transportation in the pursuit of a sustainable development strategy. The development of IWT varies per region. Public entities and institutions play an important role in the development of IWT. This paper analyses the development of IWT on the Pearl River from an institutional perspective. Chinese national fiscal reforms, land use reforms and the transfer of power from the central government to local governments impact the governance of IWT. The paper demonstrates that the privatization of inland ports was triggered by the mismatch between the objectives of IWT operators and either public objectives or market demand. This process unfolded while top-level governors did not aim for privatization. The paper shows how formal institutional changes of IWT on the Pearl River are both the result of deliberate design and a path creation in the transformation from the Chinese planned economy to the Chinese market economy. It also shows how institutional changes resulted in a dual development path (i.e. a rapid development of inland terminals but underdevelopment of inland waterways) of IWT in the Pearl River. Policy recommendations are provided based on the research findings with specific attention to the factors hindering IWT development on the Pearl River at the level of the waterway infrastructure and inland ports.     

Going green or going away: Environmental regulation,economic geography and firms’ strategies in China’s pollution-intensive industries

The high-growth, resource- and pollution-intensive industrialization model that China has pursued has caused severe environmental pollution and deterioration, particularly in a number of clusters in the coastal regions of East and Southeast China, where the Reform and Opening-up policies first started. The lack of uptake of environmental norms/values, deficit of regulatory enforcement of environmental policies, and insufficient institutional capacity have been compounding factors. As environmental standards were raised by China’s central government, the enforcement of environmental regulation has been compromised more in inland China than in coastal regions, due to China’s “decentralized governance structure” and regional disparity in terms of both economic development and environmental pollution. This paper therefore argues that rising environmental regulations, as well as firm characteristics, regional hub effect and political environment, have all been particularly important in forcing China’s pollution-intensive enterprises to restructure their production, through innovation, upgrading, geographical relocation, outsourcing and plant closure, especially in China’s coastal regions. It contributes to recent studies by developing a heuristic analytical framework that aims to be sensitive to the impacts of environmental regulation, political environment and regional hub effect over firm restructuring, but which does so by stressing these impacts are simultaneously inflected by the nature and attributes of firms. The empirical analysis suggests a roughly inverted “U”-shaped relationship between firm relocation tendency and firm size (or firm capability), resulting from complex interactions between political environment, regional hub effect and environmental regulation.     

Network configurations and R&D activities of the ICT industry in Suzhou municipality, China

This paper analyzes the network structure and R&D activities of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry in Suzhou municipality, known previously for its local state-directed Sunan model of development. Suzhou, however, has been undergoing dramatic restructuring to remake itself into a globalizing production center. We highlight the significance of the Chinese state and local/regional assets in shaping the trajectories of globalization and regional development, and the increasing importance of domestic markets and regional clusters/agglomeration for foreign ventures. We have found that Suzhou’s development path, heavily dependent on external forces, has made Suzhou a TNC (transnational corporation) satellite district. We also find that the ICT industry in Suzhou has a dual-structure, segmented between foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and domestic firms. TNCs tend to network among themselves and their interfirm networks are increasingly domestic and regionally embedded in the Yangtze River Delta, while the linkages between TNCs and local firms are weak. We argue that there is a series of technological, structural, spatial, and institutional “mismatches” that limits the establishment of “global pipelines” of knowledge exchange. We hold that the nature of global-local networks is contingent upon regional endogenous capacities and the specific ways in which global capital interacts with local institutions. Therefore, perspectives on TNCs’ local embeddedness must be positioned in their regional/external networks. We also analyze the constraints placed on Suzhou’s development into an innovative city and promote the integration of global and local/regional assets through development of indigenous capacities.     

Subcultural enterprises,brand value,and limits to financialized growth: The rise and fall of corporate surfing brands

Geographical political economy increasingly scrutinises the socio-spatial contexts for brands and branding. Less understood is the influence of subcultures – neo-tribal groups sharing passions, a leisure pursuit or practice - on enterprise formation and the pathways through which brands emerge, trading on perceived authenticity. Subcultural contexts, we argue, unleash distinctive trajectories of enterprise formation, reputation-building, value-creation, global expansion and accumulation, and ultimately destruction. Here we focus on how particular subcultural values – of authenticity, competition, risk-taking, and active participation in ‘scenes’ – interact with capitalist growth dynamics, and where over time and space such intersections bring brands unstuck. Using the case of surfing subculture and collapse of corporate surf enterprises (Quiksilver, Billabong), we theorise subcultural brand value creation and its interaction with financialized expansion, culminating in destructive contradictions. Subcultural enterprises with ‘authentic’, ‘back-of-the van’ origins convert subcultural values of credibility, localism, risk-taking, and scene participation into brand value. Trading on place-origins and subcultural authenticity, enterprises expanded in two phases. First by widening distribution using specialist ‘surf’ retailers, and second by offshoring production, public floating, and debt-financing brand acquisitions and massive retail expansion. Dictates of shareholders and investment banks spurred market saturation, and high-volume/low-quality goods. Surfing’s cherished insouciance gave way to unhinged expansionism and unmanageable debt. The subcultural authenticity that spawned brand popularity was undermined, amplifying financial risk. Disenchanted consumers who once co-created successful brands also co-destroyed them. As subcultural brands proliferate, geographical political economy must be attentive to subcultures as spawning-grounds for enterprises with accompanying limits to market growth, (dis)connections, and values.     

Exploring the relationship between local institutions in SAT India and adaptation to climate variability

This paper examines the relationship between local institutions and adaptation to climate variability in four semi-arid villages in India. Based on a qualitative survey, it draws attention to the constraints that farming households face, the role of institutions, and the implications for their capacities to adapt. Using an institutional framework, the study examines the role of local institutions in facilitating community adaptation to perceived climate variability. It was found that at the institutional and community level farmers rely on government schemes that provide social safety nets and the private sector such as moneylenders as sources of adaptation options regarding access to credit. Serious constraints emerged, however, in terms of adaptation to what may be a more challenging future. These constraints were further explored by means of grounded theory. The lack of collective feeling and action has hindered bargaining for better market prices and the development of alternate livelihood options. The need for better financial inclusion and access to more formal systems of finance is necessary to increase the overall adaptive capacity of households. During crisis situations or climatic shocks, the absence of these systems means the sale of household assets and resources especially among small and landless groups of farmers. Overall, rural households perceive that public, civic, and private institutions play a significant role in shielding them against the adverse effects of climate variability. The perceived importance of different institutions is, however, different across different categories of farmers, women, and labourers.     

The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and problems in environmental governance

Wetland mitigation banking is an American neoliberal environmental policy that has created a functioning market in `ecosystem services', commodities defined using the holistic measures of ecological science. The development of this market is discussed as a project of environmental governance, defined as the nation-state's regulation of ecological relations within its territory towards stabilizing capitalist relations of power and accumulation. I argue that the wetland banking industry serves as a bellwether that presages problems that other strategies of neoliberal environmental governance will experience. Ethnographic, economic and ecological data from the Chicago-area wetland banking industry inform a discussion of two major obstacles to neoliberal strategy: the problem of relying on ecological science to define the unit of trade, and the problem of aligning the somewhat independent relations of law, politics, markets and ecosystems across an array of spatial scales. Theoretical guidance is sought from recent work on `social natures' and from the Regulationist approach to institutional political economics.     

Winners, losers and curate's eggs: Urban and regional outcomes of Australian economic restructuring 1971–1991

Since the early 1970s the Australian economy has undergone major transformations common to other western industrialised countries. Jobs in manufacturing declined precipitately whilst the service economy grew, most significantly in producer services but also in lower skilled jobs. Tourism and services exports began to rival traditional agricultural and mining staples. Social outcomes, also typical of international trends, included rising unemployment and polarisation of incomes. Australia's changing global context, especially the nation's increasing orientation towards Asian growth economies, have underpinned restructuring. A political climate of economic rationalism has facilitated and accentuated restructuring. The economic shifts of the past quarter century have meant that everywhere the basis for economic growth has changed. Overlaying and reinforcing the re-definition of competitive advantage has been a shift in the pattern of agglomeration economies and diseconomies. New growth regions have emerged, others have had their prospects reinforced, and still others have had their outlook diminished in absolute or, more commonly, relative terms. The paper traces the regional outcomes of national economic restructuring and shifts in the balance of agglomeration economies and diseconomies over the period from 1971 to 1991. The focus is on the top end of the urban hierarchy, on specialised industrial cities where job loss from manufacturing has hit hard, amenity regions where international and domestic tourism have been major factors in growth, and non-metropolitan balances where growth has been uneven but generally low. Demographic, economic sectoral and welfare indicators are woven into a tableau of change expressed at national, intra-state and intrametropolitan scales.     

Les capitaux et le milieu géographique capital and the geographical milieu Raum und Kapital

Processes of regional concentration and development of capital suggest a geographical interpretation. Firstly towns and regions can be studied in terms of their financial strength. Financial strenght is a decisive attractive power in all countries with a market economy.Lastly the world-wide movement of capital is important to our understanding of all spatial exchange processes relating to the migration of workers and the exchange of goods. The movement of capital is controlled at a few important financial centres whose outward appearance and structure manifest this function.

Zusammenfassung

Processes of regional concentration and development of capital suggest a geographical interpretation. Firstly towns and regions can be studied in terms of their financial strength. Financial strenght is a decisive attractive power in all countries with a market economy.Lastly the world-wide movement of capital is important to our understanding of all spatial exchange processes relating to the migration of workers and the exchange of goods. The movement of capital is controlled at a few important financial centres whose outward appearance and structure manifest this function.     

煤勘企业市场营销环境分析及对策思考

作为国有煤炭地质勘查单位,在事业经费严重短缺的背景下,实际上已经作为一个企业走向市场这是不争的客观事实。通过对国有煤勘企业市场营销面临的宏观和微观环境分析,目的在于使企业清醒认识并正确把握自身面对的客观环境,以增强其灵活性及适应环境的能力;在环境分析的基础上,论述了市场营销环境的客观性、差异性、动态性、可影响性等基本特点,提出了树立营销理念、服务理念、品牌理念、竞争理念等针对性对策,为有效地拓展国有煤勘企业的生存和发展空间有一定意义。     

The political geography of Australian Federal-State relations

It is difficult, if not impossible, to completely separate political from economic relationships in any political system at any scale; this is no less true for Australia than it is for other countries. Changes in Australian Federal-State political relationships must be viewed in the context of changes in the overall system of international trade, the increasing economic power of the Pacific States and the economic restructuring of the Australian economy. However, explanations of political relationships cannot merely focus on the economic issues; the legal, historical and geographical contexts are also relevant. This paper explores Federal-State relations within the overall framework of a centre-periphery model within which jurisdictional conflicts revolve around Federal Government attempts to maintain power at the centre at the expense of the periphery. It takes the viewpoint that any meaningful discussion of political relationships must encompass aspects of human conflict which take place in particular political-geographical and legal contexts.     

Agglomeration and location choice of foreign financial institutions in China

In the midst of global economic and financial integration, there are increasing cross-border capital flows between China and the rest of the world. Foreign financial businesses also start to play more important roles in the nation’s market after waves of financial reforms. Within such a background, this study aims to investigate the agglomeration and location choice of overseas financial institutions in Chinese cities. Data from the 2004 China Economic Census show that foreign financial establishments, including banks, insurance companies, and other financial service businesses, were mainly agglomerated in coastal cities. In particular, three major urban areas, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, concentrated a majority of overseas financial institutions. Results from regression models show that foreign businesses’ location choice is greatly influenced by a city’s urban economy, involvement in the global market, and telecommunication infrastructure. However, we do not find a significant link between foreign financial institutions’ market entry and the size of domestic financial centers in China.     

Spatial distribution of livestock in Pakistan

Livestock are of vital importance in the rural economy of Pakistan. However, there are marked regional variations in the emphasis placed on the different livestock enterprises. Recognition of these variations is the basic objective of this study. From the standpoint of cattle breeding, the ranking of the animals permits an understanding of the livestock holders' preferences for different types of animals to raise in different areas. To focus on the regional variations in the livestock patterns in Pakistan, the livestock combination areas have been established. Any program which may be introduced for the improvement of animal industry in Pakistan should take cognizance of such regionalization.     

Regional and sectoral differences in the spatial restructuring of Chinese manufacturing industries during the post-WTO period

Based on the micro level data, this paper examined the spatial changes of Chinese manufacturing industries during 2002–2007. Liberalized and globalized industries are largely concentrated in the coastal region while low technology, resource-based and protected industries are widely dispersed in the inland regions. Some labor-intensive industries in the coastal region encountered congestion effects and are relocated to the central region. Statistical results indicate that industrial enterprises have significantly benefited from the geographical proximity of related enterprises. The agglomeration effects however differ across regions and sectors. The coastal region enjoys both localization and urbanization economies. The western region has no significant localization economies while the central region has no evidence of urbanization economies. The Capital Region enjoys urbanization economies to a certain degree. Both the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta have the benefits of agglomeration. The further agglomeration in the PRD however would generate congestion effects. Although labor-intensive industries gain from agglomeration effects they are more likely to suffer from the congestion effects of related enterprises. The empirical findings indicate that agglomeration effects are not pervasive in transitional economies like China. Industrial agglomeration would contribute to productivity improvement only in a globalized and liberalized environment.