Clark University | Economic Geography Journal

The Fight Against Disease: Malaria and Economic Development in Italian Regions by Marco Percoco

Abstract: Malaria is thought to be strictly related to underdevelopment and poverty, and its geographically related origin is now widely recognized. That is, it is endemic only in certain areas of the globe, with environmental and climatic characteristics that are ideal for the proliferation of mosquitoes, which are the vector for transmitting the disease. This feature is the main reason why a large body of economic literature uses mortality from malaria as a proxy with which to measure the effect of geography on human outcomes. Cases of eradication are being scrutinized by scholars to determine the socioeconomic impacts of malaria. Among the various malaria parasites, the worst, Plasmodium falciparum, infested Italian regions for centuries until its eradication in the period 1945–50. This article presents an empirical assessment of the economic outcomes of the eradication of malaria in the Italian regions by exploiting the spatial variation in mortality rates. I found support for the hypothesis that the eradication of malaria increases human capital in the long run. In particular, I found that eradication increased the years of schooling by about 0.3 years, although my evidence suggests a greater effect on males than on females. Moreover, I found support for a long-run impact of eradication actions that operated through an intergenerational spillover effect and accounted for about 0.07 years of schooling.

Key words: geography; regional development; malaria

Read Article

The Impact of Objective and Subjective Measures of Air Quality and Noise on House Prices: A Multilevel Approach for Downtown Madrid by Coro Chasco, Julie Le Gallo

Abstract: Air quality and urban noise are major concerns in big cities. This article presents an evaluation of how they affect transaction prices in downtown Madrid. For this purpose, we incorporated both objective and subjective measures of air quality and noise and used multilevel models, since our sample was hierarchically organized into three levels: 5,080 houses (level 1) in 759 census tracts (level 2) and 43 neighborhoods (level 3). Variables are available for each level, individual characteristics for the first level, and various socioeconomic data for the other levels. We estimated multilevel hedonic models to assess the marginal willingness to pay for better air quality and reduced noise in downtown Madrid. We found that noise and air pollution are place-based perception variables with a so-called halo effect: residents in wealthier neighborhoods do not perceive their environment as being highly polluted because of their higher “sense of place.” In addition, we found a counterintuitive positive sign for the effect of objective measures of pollutants on housing prices but a significantly negative effect of the subjective measures. For these reasons, we conclude that housing prices are better explained by subjective evaluation factors than by objective measurements.

Key words: air quality; noise; housing prices; multilevel model;spatial analysis

Read Article

Value Creation in Scene-based Music Production: The Case of Electronic Club Music in Germany, by Bastian Lange, Hans-Joachim Bürkner

Abstract: The focus of this article is on the variability of value creation in the popular music industry. Recent trends in electronic music have been based on both the valorization of global tastes and of local specialities in performance and production. Depending on musical styles and market niches, local scenes have become important forces behind heterogeneous “globalocal” markets. At the same time, technological change and the virtualization of music production and distribution contribute to increasingly differentiated configurations of value creation. It is therefore necessary to reconstruct theoretically and empirically the new interplay among the local music production, digital media markets, and virtual communities that are involved. On the basis of empirical explorations in a German hot spot of electronic club-music production (the city of Berlin), the article indentifies local interaction practice and constellations of stakeholders. The findings show that value creation in these rapidly changing production scenes has moved away from the large-scale distribution of producer-induced media to audience-induced live performance and interactive soundtrack production. This change involves the rising importance of cultural embeddings such as taste building, reputation building among artists and producers, and local community building. Starting from an open theoretical problematization of value creation with regard to fluid scenes and shifting modes of production, the results of first empirical reconstructions are taken as inputs to an evolving discussion on the configurations of value creation in consumer-based strands of music production.

Key words:

music industry; value creation; value chain; creative economy; Berlin

Read Article

Fueling Capitalism: Oil, the Regulation Approach, and the Ecology of Capital, by Matt Huber

Abstract:Despite a deepening set of socioecological contradictions, it is remarkable that oil's centrality to capitalism persists. In economic geography, the regulation approach has been useful in explaining the persistence of capitalism despite its contradictory tendencies, and scholars have recently applied the regulation approach to the geography of natural resources and environmental governance. In this article, I argue that environmental regulation theory is ill equipped to explain the persistence of petro-capitalism in the United States. This literature has been constructed largely through a critique of regulation theory on two grounds: ignoring the ecological dimension and relying on periodization. Conversely, I aim to show that petro-capitalism can be usefully analyzed through the very classical regulationist lens that environmental appropriations jettison. First, rather than positing nature as an unexamined “extra-economic” dimension, the case of oil reveals how ecology can be integrated into a foundational concept of the regulation approach—the wage relation. Specifically, the Fordist wage relation of mass production for mass consumption was dependent on the construction of a specific kind of “high energy economy.” Massive productivity gains in the labor process, powered by electricity, created larger pressures for an equally energy-intensive geography of consumption. In this respect, oil played a decisive role in the extension of the spaces between home and work through the partial generalization of automobility and single-family home ownership. Second, I attempt to recuperate the method of “periodization” by explaining how a set of institutional supports served to regularize the provision of oil through the domestic oil market from 1935 through 1972. I end with a discussion of the “institutional exhaustion” of a specifically national form of petro-Fordism during the 1970s.

Key words:

oil; regulation approach; Fordism

Read Article

CONTENTS

Editorial

Journal Articl

BOOK REVIE

ABSTRACTS

e-mail alerts