MRPG: The Changing Scale of Economic Regions: An Examination Using Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis

在列斐伏尔的开创性工作之后，规模在社会经济过程中的作用在地理文献中变得突出。虽然新的理论研究正在改变我们对规模在世界经济中作用的概念化方式，但这项研究将通过强调实证方面来扩展和检验这些概念。具体地说，该项目将重点关注美国过去50年来不断变化的经济活动规模以及经济区域的形成和瓦解。这项研究规划拨款(MRPG)要解决的研究问题包括：将个别地区(县级单位)的命运组合成一个区域的经济过程的规模是否随着时间的推移而恒定？有没有这样的时候，经济活动在广泛的地理范围内联系在一起(多个县甚至多个州的地区)，从而在美国大部分地区创造了相当均匀的增长或下降模式？或者，美国的力量是否正在制造一幅增长和衰退不平衡的支离破碎的图景，在经济变化方面，毗邻的小地区往往朝着不同的方向移动？在Smith和Dennis(1987)对东北制造业核心的合并和最终碎片化的研究之后，拟议的研究将利用探索性空间数据分析中的新技术来重新评估他们的研究结果，这些新技术提供了更精细的空间分辨率来检查增长、下降和与变化相关的规模。以前的工作研究这些问题的规模太大，无法捕捉到该地区发生的变化的异质性(Smith和Dennis，1987)，或使用相对简单的统计方法(Shelton，1995)。此外，制造业的持续下滑表明，对区域经济变化的分析还应包括服务业在界定经济区域方面的作用。使用这种替代方法的分析可以提供关于规模的新见解，这可能有助于对整个美国地区增长和衰退的决定因素以及这些过程的规模进行更大规模的研究。此外，这项研究将为政策制定者就实施区域经济增长和发展政策的适当规模进行讨论。

The role of scale in socioeconomic processes has become prominent in the geographic literature, following on the seminal work of Lefebvre. While new theoretical research is changing how we conceptualize the role of scale in the world economy, this study will extend and test these concepts by emphasizing empirical aspects. Specifically, the project will focus on the changing scale of economic activities and on the formation and disintegration of economic regions over the past fifty years in the United States. Research questions to be addressed under this research planning grant (MRPG) include the following: Is the scale of economic processes that groups the fates of individual areas (county-level units) together into a region constant over time? Are there times when economic activities are linked over a wide geographical scale (multi-county or even multi-state regions) and thereby creating patterns of fairly even growth or decline over a large portion of the US? Alternatively, are forces in the US producing a fragmented landscape of uneven growth and decline, with small adjoining areas often moving in different directions in terms of economic change? Following on a study by Smith and Dennis (1987) on the coalescence and eventual fragmentation of the Northeastern Manufacturing Core, the proposed research will reevaluate the results of their study utilizing new techniques in exploratory spatial data analysis that provide a finer spatial resolution to examine growth, decline, and the scale associated with change. Previous work studied these issues at a scale too large to capture the heterogeneity of the changes taking place in the region (Smith and Dennis,1987), or used relatively simple statistical measures (Shelton, 1995). Furthermore, the continued decline in manufacturing suggests that the analysis of regional economic change should also include the role of services in defining economic regions. Analyses using this alternative approach can offer new insights on scale that might be useful for a larger study on the determinants of regional growth and decline in the US as a whole, and on the scale of these processes. Additionally, this research will inform discussion among policymakers on the appropriate scale for implementing regional policies for economic growth and development.