Doctoral Dissertation Research: Comparative Space-Time Dynamics

经济不平等和趋同的研究不断吸引人们的关注，成为一个充满活力的学术景观，跨学科的文献已经发展起来。这种兴趣反映在这一研究领域的时空思维上，即分析经济趋同的空间格局和地理不平等的时间动态。然而，过程分析（时间序列分析）和形式分析（空间格局分析）的文献在很大程度上是相互孤立的。因此，这两种丰富且不断增长的文献的整合为真正的空间整合社会科学提供了机会。因此，该项目的目的是双重的：首先，开发新的时空测量和推理方法来比较区域经济结构和相互作用；二是进一步认识空间依赖在经济增长中的作用。该项目的目标是利用几何指标进行分布动态和空间格局分析的交叉施肥。本研究将运用这些新方法对中国与美国的时空经济结构进行比较。此外，这些方法将在开源软件包STARS: spatial -time Analysis of Regional Systems中实现，方便对时空经济过程的研究。越来越多的时空数据的可用性已经超过了整个社会科学的时空分析技术的发展。空间和时间的整合将在地理学和其他社会科学之间产生更密切的相互作用，同时为地理学在经济发展中的作用提供新的视角。空间经济增长的比较分析有助于缩小增长理论与其实证检验之间的差距。这将使我们更好地理解空间在不同区域经济中的作用。从政策角度来看，时空显性指标的发展将为决策者和城市规划者提供新的工具，通过识别贫困地区的时空集群来设计和评估消除贫困方案。虽然这项研究的实质重点是区域收入动态，但所审查的方法问题与研究具有空间和时间维度的广泛现象有关。所开发的方法预计将对土地利用演变的比较时空动态、疾病扩散、犯罪热点、社会经济不平等等领域产生影响。

The study of economic inequality and convergence continues to attract attention becoming a dynamic academic landscape where an interdisciplinary literature has evolved. This interest has been reflected in the spatial and temporal thinking in this research domain, that is, the analysis of spatial patterns of economic convergence and the temporal dynamics of geographical inequality. However, the literatures of process analysis (time series analysis) and form analysis (spatial pattern analysis) are largely isolated from one another. Consequently, the integration of these two rich and growing literatures offers opportunities for a truly spatially integrated social science. Hence, the aims of this project are two-fold: first, to develop new space-time measurements and inferential approaches to compare regional economic structure and interactions; second, to further the understanding of the role spatial dependence plays in economic growth. The objective of this project is the cross-fertilization of distributional dynamics and spatial pattern analysis using geometric indicators. This research will apply these new methods to compare the Chinese space-time economic structure with that of the United States. In addition, these methods will be implemented in the Open Source software package STARS: Space-Time Analysis of Regional Systems that facilitates the study of space-time economic process.The increasing availability of space-time data has outpaced the development of space-time analytical techniques across social sciences. The integration of space and time would generate much closer interactions among geography and other social sciences in general, while providing new perspectives for the role of geography in economic development. Comparative analysis of spatial economic growth will help to narrow the gap between growth theories and their empirical testing. This will better our understanding of the role of space in different regional economies. From a policy perspective, the development of space-time explicit indicators will provide policy makers and urban planners with new tools to design and evaluate poverty eradication programs by identifying space-time clusters of poor regions. While the substantive focus of this research is on regional income dynamics, the methodological issues examined are relevant to the study of a wide class of phenomena that have spatial and temporal dimensions. The developed methods are expected to have implications in areas such as comparative space-time dynamics of land use evolution, disease diffusion, crime hot spots, socioeconomic inequalities, among others.