There is strong provincial and national agency in these imaginings, but this study argues that they have also been structured at global and regional levels by new approaches to regions, evolving understandings of the meaning and agency of borders, and the increasing influence of neoliberal views on trade, investment, and transborder and regional interactions, embraced by many in the PRC since the 1990s. The approach is also historical in the importance it attaches to the legacies of the past in understanding the present, and through its dynamic analysis of the changing constructions of Yunnan's positioning over time and across space. This informs the way that the thesis speaks to wider questions of the spatial structures and scales of political economy, the theoretical and empirical problems to which this study aims to make a contribution. / This is a study of the political economy of the production of spatial relations of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. It identifies a dynamic process of imaginings since the early 1990s involving the repositioning of Yunnan from periphery of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the centre of various regional constructs, yet without compromising its national belonging. These imaginings have found expression in policy statements and provincial narratives, Yunnan's participation in transborder regional institutions, the development of infrastructure networks through the province, and growth in transborder trade and investment. They have been accompanied by social and cultural change across and around borders, and experienced differently at various localities within the province. In the 1990s these imaginings were dominated by economic conceptions of development, looking to regional integration and engagement beyond the PRC's borders. These have remained strong drivers since. However, especially during the 2000s, other social, political and non-traditional security concerns have increasingly come to the fore, in turn strengthening Yunnan's national belonging. / Summers, Timothy Andrew. / "December 2010." / Adviser: Shaogang Wang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-04, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 354-377). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Vita. Bibliography: L. [85]-89.

No description available.

Note:

This Dissertation is submitted to the Faculty of Architecture, University of the Witwatersnmd, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Development Planning. Johannesburg, 1998 / Shortage of resources in South Africa and unbalanced regional and local development for the past decades has almost compelled a paradigm shift in local government planning. South Africa is characterised by disintegration and planning on the bases of racial segregation, thus separating functionally linked settlements and placing them under separate municipalities. [No abstract provided. Information taken from introduction] / MT2017

The three chapters of my dissertation study factors that contribute to the uneven distribution of economic activities across space. In the first chapter, I study why firms are more productive in larger cities, by focusing on a potential explanation first proposed by Adam Smith: Larger cities facilitate greater division of labor within firms. Using a dataset of Brazilian firms, I first document that division of labor is indeed robustly correlated with city size, controlling for firm size. I propose a theoretical model in which this relationship is generated by both a selection effect---firms endogenously sort across space, choosing different extents of division of labor---and a treatment effect---larger cities increase division of labor for all firms, by reducing the costs associated with greater division of labor. The model embeds a theory of firms' choice of the optimal division of labor in a spatial equilibrium model. Structural estimates derived from the model show that division of labor accounts for 16\% of the productivity advantage of larger cities in Brazil, half of which is due to firm sorting and the other half to the treatment effect of city size. The theory also generates a set of auxiliary predictions of firms' responses to a reduction in the cost of division of labor. Exploiting a quasi-experiment that changes the cost of division of labor within cities---the gradual roll-out of broadband internet infrastructure---I find causal empirical support for these predictions, validating the model. Finally, the quasi-experiment also provides out-of-sample validation for the structural estimation. The estimated model predicts changes in the average division of labor within different cities in response to the new broadband internet infrastructure, which I find are similar to the actual changes. The second chapter, co-authored with Ariel Burstein, Gordon Hanson and Jonathan Vogel, studies how occupation (or industry) tradability shapes local labor-market adjustment to immigration. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign-born labor into a region crowds native-born workers out of (or into) immigrant-intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980 to 2012, we find that consistent with our theory a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native-born workers in more relative to less immigrant-intensive nontradable jobs, but has no such effect within tradable occupations. Further analysis of occupation labor payments is consistent with adjustment to immigration within tradables occurring more through changes in output (versus changes in prices) when compared to adjustment within nontradables, thus confirming our model's theoretical mechanism. We then use an extended quantitative model to interpret the magnitudes of our reduced-form estimates and to aggregate up the consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration from the region-occupation level to the region-level. The third chapter proposes a new channel through which improvements in transportation or communications technologies affect skill distribution across space. In this joint work with Yang Jiao, we start with the empirical observations that substantial skill and occupation relocation took place across U.S. cities during past decades. In particular, big cities attract more skilled workers and become more specialized in cognitive-intensive occupations. Motivated by empirical literature on the association between modern communications technology adoption and production fragmentation, we develop a spatial equilibrium model with domestic production fragmentation to analyze the impact of a reduction in the costs of cross-city production teams---e.g., communications cost---on spatial distribution of skills and economic activities. The model generates predictions consistent with the observed empirical patterns, including more spatial segregation of skilled and unskilled workers, and occupation specialization across U.S. cities over time. In contrast to findings in the international offshoring literature, in which there are winners and losers, we find that under regularities conditions, there are Pareto welfare gains for all agents with heterogeneous skills, together with a substantial measured labor productivity increase at the aggregate level.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii, 1970. / Bibliography: leaves [253]-258. / xiii, 258 l graphs, tables, maps

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 86 p. : ill., maps (some col.). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-84).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, June 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.