Transportation, Knowledge and Space in Urban and Regional Economics

With its discussion of Armington elasticities and Poisson distributions, this book is primarily targeted at economists studying high-income countries (particularly in Scandinavia and East Asia). The chapters link transportation and spatial planning to shopping, employment, housing and knowledge.

Many of these analyses are theoretical, employing different modelling techniques to predict behaviour. For instance, the chapter on suburban shopping districts develops an equilibrium approach for maintaining the vitality of older commercial areas. And the chapter on highway toll pricing uses a network equilibrium model to account for the ways that vehicular use of highways leads to congestion and deterioration of roads, and suggest a pricing system taking these into account.

The chapter on regional development shows dense clusters of knowledge generation and scientific publishing in certain regions of North America and Western Europe (notably Silicon Valley in the US and London–Oxford–Cambridge in the UK). Beijing has also skyrocketed in science production. The multi-region model developed in this chapter is applied not just to scholarship, but also to innovation at the corporate level. The data demonstrate that long-distance scientific collaboration is still uncommon, and spatial concentration benefits knowledge generation. One concern is that cities and regions that already draw large amounts of funding and talent will continue to diverge from those with more sluggish knowledge infrastructures, increasing global inequality.

The English is occasionally awkward, but Transportation, Knowledge and Space in Urban and Regional Economics is likely to be of interest to those applying econometric methods to transport and accessibility planning (very broadly defined).

Further reading:

Chen, Zhenhua and Kingsley E Haynes (2014), “Regional economic output and public surface transportation infrastructure: a spatial granger approach”, The Review of Regional Studies Vol 44, pages 263–279, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286787942_Regional_economic_out....

Levy, Caren (2013), “Travel choice reframed: ‘deep distribution’ and gender in urban transport”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 25, No 1, pages 47–63, available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247813477810.

Patel, Shirish B, Jasmine Saluja and Oormi Kapadia (2018), “Affordable housing needs affordable transit”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 30, No 1, pages 123–140, available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247817738188.

Book note prepared by Christine Ro