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

继列费夫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如何概念化规模在世界经济中的作用，本研究将通过强调实证方面来扩展和测试这些概念。 具体而言，该项目将侧重于经济活动规模的变化以及美国过去50年来经济区域的形成和解体。根据这项研究规划补助金（MRPG）要解决的研究问题包括以下内容：是经济过程的规模，组的命运，个别地区（县级单位）一起到一个地区常数随着时间的推移？ 经济活动是否在广泛的地理范围内（多个县甚至多个州的地区）联系在一起，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，美国的力量是否造成了一种不均衡增长和衰退的支离破碎的局面，相邻的小地区往往在经济变化方面朝着不同的方向发展？在Smith和Dennis（1987）关于东北制造业核心的合并和最终分裂的研究之后，拟议的研究将重新评估他们的研究结果，利用探索性空间数据分析中的新技术，提供更精细的空间分辨率来检查增长，衰退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，无法捕捉该地区发生的变化的异质性（史密斯和丹尼斯，1987年），或使用相对简单的统计措施（谢尔顿，1995年）。此外，制造业的持续下降表明，对区域经济变化的分析也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在规模上提供新的见解，这可能有助于对美国整体区域增长和下降的决定因素以及这些过程的规模进行更大范围的研究。此外，这项研究还将为决策者讨论实施区域经济增长和发展政策的适当规模提供信息。

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.