financialisation and justice in the city a commentary intensification of the transformation of real property into financial instruments has worsened urban inequality in the past several decades increased financialisation in itself does not create uneven development and property investment cycles since these phenomena have always been hallmarks of real estate development under capitalism rather it is the combination of financialisation with neoliberal ideology globalisation and the constriction of state sponsored social welfare and housing affordability programs that underlies the inequities produced by property investment progressive policy makers can potentially utilise financial instruments in order to achieve greater justice if they are able to challenge neoliberal hegemony

reconstituting the state city powers and exposures in chicago s infrastructure leases in the 2000s cities across north america began leasing existing infrastructure to global investment consortia previous evaluations of infrastructure leases focus on the lack of transparency of th

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

the financialisation of rental housing a comparative analysis of new york city and berlin this paper compares how recent waves of private equity real estate investment have reshaped the rental housing markets in new york and berlin through secondary analysis of separate primary research projects we explore financialisation s impact on tenants neighbourhoods and urban space despite their contrasting market contexts and investor strategies financialisation heightened existing inequalities in housing affordability and stability and rearranged spaces of abandonment and gentrification in both cities conversely cities themselves also shaped the process of financialisation with weakened rental protections providing an opening to transform affordable housing into a new global asset class we also show how financialisation s adaptability in the face of changing market conditions entails ongoing but shifting processes of uneven development comparative studies of financialisation can help highlight geographically disparate but similar exposures to this global process thus contributing to a critical urban politics of finance that crosses boundaries of space sector and scale

the role and behaviour of commercial property investors and developers in french urban regeneration the experience of the paris region summary this paper provides an analysis of the factors underlying private investment decisions concerning property development with specific reference to urban regeneration in the french context it is based on the results of a behavioural survey and mca analysis of the behaviour patterns and motivations of active private investors and developers in the french commercial property markets and their involvement in french urban regeneration initiatives the pattern of investment and development activity over the 1997 2002 french property market recovery period has been studied and a typology of actors set up based on their investment policy for these property markets the findings indicate that property investors in urban regeneration essentially seek speculative developments and short term investments

financialisation the valuation of investment property and the urban built environment in the uk the financialisation literature has been criticised for its limited empirical base and its failure adequately to link the everyday world with that of high finance the paper addresses these shortcomings by examining the calculative practice of property valuation the way that valuations are performed affects their results and therefore the operation of the property market the paper traces the evolving influence of finance capital on the valuation of commercial property in the uk by constructing a historiography of investment valuation since 1960 traditional approaches to valuation have been increasingly challenged by those derived from financial economics however the former remains the dominant method for undertaking market valuation its grounding in comparison a centring and standardising process offers an explanation for some of the changes in the urban built environment that are ascribed to financialisation this suggests that a more detailed and historically sensitive interpretation of financialisation is required

exploring income inequality in rural coastal viet nam income inequality has been rising in parallel with the economic liberalisation process in the former centrally planned economies the opportunities for non agricultural income associated with the market liberalisation process in former centrally planned economies would seem to be important in determining inequality within the rural sector this article reviews the trends in inequality in viet nam examining differential trends and hypothesised causes inequality is important because of its relationship to other factors in the evolution of the agricultural economy such as the incidence of poverty and the sustainability of emerging income sources this article analyses income inequality based on data collected by the author in two districts in coastal northern viet nam the results demonstrate that non agricultural income sources specifically aquaculture and wage and remittance contribute more to present inequality than any other income source simulation shows that the emergence of aquaculture since the l

renegotiation of concession contracts in latin america evidence from the water and transport sectors abstract high rates of contract renegotiation have raised serious questions about the viability of the concession model to attract private participation in infrastructure in developing countries after extending in reduced form a standard regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts we use a unique data set of 307 concessions awarded in latin america from 1989 to 2000 covering the sectors of transport and water to analyze the determinants of this high incidence of renegotiations of infrastructure contracts we look in details at the impact on the probability of renegotiation of a concession of regulatory institutions institutional features economic shocks and of the characteristics of the concession contracts themselves we then derive some policy implications of our work

cops and crime abstract the violent crime control and law enforcement act of 1994 established the community oriented policing services cops program that provided grants to states and localities to pay up to 75 of the cost for new police hires for 3 years to date the cops program has awarded almost 5 billion in hiring grants paying for 64 000 new police officers we use annual data from 1990 through 2001 from 2074 cities with populations in excess of 10 000 to show that for each officer paid for by grant funds the size of the force expands by 0 70 officers the size of cops grants are correlated with population and crime rates but not the pre cops time trends in crime rates or the size of the police force this allows us to use the size of cops grants as an instrument for the size of the police force in regressions where crime is the outcome of interest these models indicate that police added to the force by cops generated statistically significant reductions in auto thefts burglaries robberies and aggravated assaults

using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime comment previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime possibly due to simultaneity problems this paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrumental variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime the null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected

incarceration and incapacitation evidence from the 2006 italian collective pardon abstract in august 2006 the italian government released one third of the nation s prison inmates via a national collective pardon we test for a discontinuous break in national crime rates corresponding to the mass release we also test for the effect of the return of the incarceration rate to its predicted steady state level on national crime rates finally we exploit regional variation in prison releases based on the province of residence of pardoned inmates all three sources of variation yield substantial incapacitation effect estimates and suggest that the crime preventing effects of incarceration diminish with increases in the incarceration rate jel k42

resource development and inequality in indigenous societies concern has been expressed both by indigenous people and by academic analysts that large scale resource development may sharpen inequality in what are relatively egalitarian indigenous societies much of the academic literature suggests that resource development does indeed have this effect but such claims are usually based on very limited empirical evidence in addition the literature is lacking in conceptual frameworks which allow the concept of inequality to be adequately specified take into account the quite different forms of income which resource development can generate explain rather than simply document specific changes in income distribution and on this basis provide grounds for policy prescription this article seeks to develop such a framework

the measurement of inequality and poverty a policy maker s guide to the literature abstract mathematical measures of poverty and inequality embody values that reflect the historical political social intellectual and ethical forces prevalent at the time of their formulation so that policy makers may select measures of poverty and inequality that are consistent with their values it is important to make explicit the value judgements implicit in the measures models designed to measure poverty and inequality fall into four categories absolute poverty measures absolute income measures relative poverty measures and relative inequality measures this article examines the principal models within each category and discusses the assumptions limitations and values implicit in the models

reexamining criminal behavior the importance of omitted variable bias to what extent do changes in the expected penalty alter the willingness of individuals to engage in illegal activity becker 1968 developed a theoretical model of criminal behavior that asserted offenders respond to incentives in much the same way as those who engage in legal activities respond ehrlich 1973 pioneered empirical tests of the model and concluded that there was a strong positive correlation between income inequality and property crimes that the crime rate was positively related to relative gains and negatively related to the costs associated with criminal activity and that law enforcement activity had a deterrent effect for all crimes recently many papers have used arrest rates to mea

isolated capital cities accountability and corruption evidence from us states we show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across us states in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability we then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms newspapers cover state politics more when readers are closer to the capital voters who live far from the capital are less knowledgeable and interested in state politics and they turn out less in state elections we also find that isolated capitals are associated with more money in state level campaigns and worse public good provision jel d72 d73 h41 h83 k42 r23

sustainability and the anchoring of capital negotiations surrounding two major urban projects in switzerland theurillat t and crevoisier o sustainability and the anchoring of capital negotiations surrounding two major urban projects in switzerland regional studies this article deals with the anchoring of mobile financial capital in the city and urban sustainability illustrated by a case study in the swiss context it develops the theory that new forms of negotiation are appearing around urban projects development construction firms are playing a central role they are capable of evaluating and translating the multiple dimensions of a project and certain sustainability challenges into financial terms in a way that permits the anchoring of capital in the city in parallel the issue of sustainability depends greatly on the capacity of the local actors to negotiate with the promoters of urban projects

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk henneberry j and mouzakis f familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk regional studies this paper examines how effectively investment yields incorporate spatial variations in risks and returns into property prices it is hypothesized that the pricing of property investments in non core uk regions is affected by a pure familiarity heuristic adopted by investors based in london consequently the determination of office yields is based not on the intrinsic investment characteristics of regional markets but on a core market benchmark combined with a regional premium this results in very long term mispricing patterns with implications not just for the office property investment market but also for the regions especially those outside the core

how much crime reduction does the marginal prisoner buy abstractwe estimate the effect of changes in incarceration rates on changes in crime rates using state level panel data we develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities given that incarceration rates adjust to permanent changes in behavior with a dynamic lag one can identify variation in incarceration rates that is not contaminated by contemporary changes in criminal behavior for the period 1978 2004 we find crime prison elasticities that are considerably larger than those implied by ordinary least squares estimates we also present results for two subperiods 1978 90 and 1991 2004 our instrumental variables estimates for the earlier period suggest relatively large crime prison effects for the later time period however the effects of changes in incarceration rates on crime rates are much smaller

finance capital actor network theory and the struggle over calculative agencies in the business property markets of mexico city metropolitan region david l and halbert l finance capital actor network theory and the struggle over calculative agencies in the business property markets of mexico city metropolitan region regional studies the selective spatialities of business property in the mexico city metropolitan region are explained with reference to actor network theory building on a conception of markets as the outcomes of the confrontation between different calculative agencies the paper discusses how investment managers have to negotiate the integration of new buildings and spaces into their portfolios alongside pre existing actor networks whose power and autonomy differ across the metropolitan area in a fragmented city region the longstanding urban coalition in the central part of the area may lock out the business property development market to finance capital while some peripheral areas may be more opened up

financial markets developers and the geographies of housing in brazil a supply side account financialisation and housing are predominantly associated to mortgages for homeownership and securitisation techniques this paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry

filtering risk away global finance capital transcalar territorial networks and the un making of city regions an analysis of business property development in bangalore india halbert l and rouanet h filtering risk away global finance capital transcalar territorial networks and the un making of city regions an analysis of business property development in bangalore india regional studies this paper contributes to ongoing debates on the landing or anchoring of global finance capital into the urban built environment inspired by recent advances from the school of territorial economics it develops the concept of transcalar territorial networks ttns to explain the processes that result in fixing foreign financial capital into business properties the paper demonstrates that ttns contribute to filter away the risks that foreign investors associate with the complexity of local regional property markets it also highlights the potential consequences on the spatial economic and social dynamics of city regions

the effect of prison population size on crime rates evidence from prison overcrowding litigation simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime to break that simultaneity this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population the resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies a one prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen index i crimes per year while calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner

inequality and poverty in china institutional change and public policy 1978 to 1988 there is considerable uncertainty and debate about changes in poverty and living standards that are likely to occur in an economy in transition from centrally planned allocations to a more market oriented basis but a dearth of evidence and rigorous analysis remains there is a tradeoff between policies that provide a guaranteed living standard with low inequality albeit at a low income level and systems that provide much higher monetary incomes but create greater income variability and vulnerability particularly during periods of high inflation the chinese experience following the economic reforms of 1978 highlights this dilemma and our analysis strongly suggests the need for appropriate social safety nets if rapid growth is to be achieved without the poor and vulnerable bearing the costs of such growth

distribution of ecological entitlements implications for economic security and population movement abstract the concept of economic and environmental security is explored in a broad sense as a series of necessary entitlements to forest and other resources traditional measures of inequality such as the gini coefficient or the atkinson index of inequality which rely on measures of the distribution of formal cash income or wealth are regarded as flawed to the extent that they do not adequately reflect the value and distribution of access to non marketed goods and services an ecologically sensitive atkinson or gini index is proposed as a more relevant measure of inequality and of economic and environmental security to improve security policies must attempt to improve the value of these indices an empirical example is provided based on household survey data for 357 households in 24 villages in a rainforest zone of cameroon analyses of data relating to forest use incomes and demographics provides insights into the distribution of ecological entitlements across various income groups and into the impacts of these entitlements on economic and environmental security through measures related to population migration the empirical analysis demonstrates a number of important conclusions a use of ecologically adjusted indices provides a more complete picture of inequality inequality in the forest zone is less pervasive than traditional measures would have us believe b traditional forest entitlements contribute positively to reducing inequality and improving security and c income support programs targeted to conventional cash crops cocoa and coffee increase inequality and reduce security the analyses also demonstrate that when other economic factors have been taken into account population movement can be a useful indicator of environmental security an analysis of migration demographic and income patterns suggests that low population movement in this zone can be construed as an indicator of higher environmental security the analysis also provides direct evidence that a decline in ecological entitlements increases the probability of migration out of an area

leveraging finance capital urban change and self empowerment of real estate developers in india this paper questions the effects of the financialisation of indian real estate markets with a focus on the bangalore city region research on southern cities has concluded that globally connected but locally embedded real estate developers contribute to anchoring transnational investment yet the acknowledged dearth of studies on the real estate industry in post liberalisation india limits our understanding of the ongoing empowerment of local urban actors including developers adopting a cultural political economy perspective the paper analyses how developers leverage finance capital to achieve greater economic and political agency and thus contribute to the material symbolic and political transformations of cities it first demonstrates that finance capital has sustained bangalore based developers growth strategies throughout southern india subsequently developers shape the materialities of metropolises via a piecemeal juxtaposition of medium sized developments although this may occasionally meet government strategies for modernising their cities it more often than not constitutes an understudied obstacle to states mega projects that are outdone by developers ability to work through the intricacies of local land markets and bureaucracies furthermore having become dominant city builders developers are in a situation to circulate representations concerning what the desirable city should be such narratives aim at inserting local real estate markets into globalising financial commodity chains while also legitimating developers own role consequently developers attempt to promote with some success prescriptions in favour of state reforms and the adoption of pro urban growth policies the ongoing financialisation of urban production thus participates in the self empowerment of developers in india s cities

introduction the financialisation of urban production conditions mediations and transformations a distinctive feature of urban spaces lies in their high infrastructural density because buildings roads stadiums airports are all capital intensive they rely in turn on financial infrastructures that circulate not passengers power or data but capital more or less temporarily fixed in the urban built environment harvey 2001 like many infrastructures edwards 2003 financial ones remain invisible to most but for cases of major disruptions think for instance of how the subprime crisis revealed the interconnection between households mortgages and capital markets this relative invisibility should however not obfuscate the importance of financial circuits in the design construction exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment urban production from here on researchers in urban studies unevenly pay attention to financial circuits understood here as the sociotechnical systems that channel investments in the forms of equity and debt into urban production major accounts of city making under neoliberalisation from the 1990s and 2000s are a case in point such studies mainly focus on evolving rationales for public intervention and the resulting changes in public actors modes of operation where welfare provision gives way to entrepreneurial policies harvey 1989 moulaert et al 2003 tasan kok and baeten 2012 the growing importance of private investments and the concomitant reconfiguration of public spending is mostly acknowledged as a contextual factor while the private investors and international finance capital targeted by public authorities remain in the background of analyses there is thus a dearth of conceptualisation and of evidence on how private financiers and investors collectively or individually shape or adjust to this new context and on the role played by those acting at the interface between public and private bodies it is thus important to go beyond simplistic analytical distinctions such as public subsidies versus private investments and to scrutinise financial circuits as relevant

building cities on financial assets the financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the paris city region the 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment against that background recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent maximisation strategies of landowners thereby reinforcing the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset harvey 1982 2006 however this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors neglecting to demonstrate how in practice such financial investors who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices shape urban redevelopment projects in this article the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the paris city region city of saint ouen the analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets reveals the unevenness of a local authority s ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors accordingly given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors expectations these expectations are met through translating market finance categories risk return and liquidity into elements of the urban fabric this bears substantial consequences for policy making given the current context of austerity as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors

finance business property and urban and regional development halbert l henneberry j and mouzakis f finance business property and urban and regional development regional studies compared with other factors of production the supply of business property and its role in urban and regional development has received comparatively little attention traditional analyses assume that the supply of such property responds to demand in a relatively unproblematic way however there is evidence that institutional structures and processes in the property and capital markets have produced regional imbalances in the quantity quality and price of business accommodation benefiting some places and handicapping others such imbalances are present to different degrees internationally and their characteristics and causes are similarly varied the special issue addresses this gap in knowledge

a model of optimal incapacitation one of the functions of the criminal sanctions of imprisonment and the death sentence is to prevent individuals from doing harm by removing them from the population this incapacitative function of sanctions is considered below in a model in which the amount of harm individuals cause each period that they are free is not influenced by the threat of sanctions so as to abstract from the role of sanctions as a deterrent 2 the model is initially examined assuming that an individual s dangerousness i e the harm he will do if free remains the same each period of his life and that the sanction is imprisonment in this case it is optimal to imprison an individual if his dangerousness exceeds a threshold equal to the per period social cost of imprisonment moreover if it is optimal to imprison an individual at all it will be best to do so for life the optimal probability of apprehension is also determined the model is then extended in several ways it is first supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with age in this case it is again optimal to imprison individuals if their dangerousness exceeds the per period cost of imprisonment but it is optimal to release them if their dangerousness later falls below the threshold it is next supposed that the dangerousness of individuals declines with time spent in prison due to a rehabilitative effect in this case it is optimal to imprison individuals beginning at a lower threshold of dangerousness than the per period cost of imprisonment imprisonment is now socially more valuable and to release them if their dangerousness becomes sufficiently low finally it is supposed that a choice can be made between imprisonment and the death penalty and the optimal choice is discussed

fighting corruption to improve schooling evidence from a newspaper campaign in uganda what are the most effective ways to increase primary school enrollment and student learning we argue that innovations in governance of social services may yield the highest return since social service delivery in developing countries is often plagued by inefficiencies and corruption we illustrate this by using data from an unusual policy experiment a newspaper campaign in uganda aimed at reducing capture of public funds by providing schools parents with information to monitor local officials handling of a large education grant program the campaign was highly successful and the reduction in capture had a positive effect on enrollment and student learning jel d73 i22 o12

panic on the streets of london police crime and the july 2005 terror attacks in this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central london in july 2005 the attacks resulted in a large redeployment of police officers to central london boroughs as compared to outer london in fact police deployment in central london increased by over 30 percent in the six weeks following the july 7 bombings during this time crime fell significantly in central relative to outer london study of the timing of the crime reductions and their magnitude the types of crime which were more likely to be affected and a series of robustness tests looking at possible biases all make us confident that our research approach identifies a causal impact of police on crime implementing an instrumental variable approach shows an elasticity of crime with respect to police of approximately 0 3 so that a 10 percent increase in police activity reduces crime by around 3 percent

the secondary circuit of capital reconsidered globalization and the u s real estate sector1 the author examines the u s real estate sector to show how the state shapes global real estate flows and networks of activity through the creation and control of liquid resources the analysis focuses on the role of state laws and regulations in the expansion of the mortgage backed securities markets and the development of real estate investment trusts reits these institutional developments represent a series of ad hoc state efforts to delocalize residential and commercial property and embed real estate financing within global capital markets rather than viewing globalization as weakening the state the author argues that the u s state s capacity to influence the degree and development of liquidity is a powerful mechanism of globalization

the effect of police response time on crime clearance rates police agencies devote vast resources to minimizing the time that it takes them to attend the scene of a crime despite this the long standing consensus is that police response time has no meaningful effect on the likelihood of catching offenders we revisit this question using a uniquely rich dataset from the greater manchester police to identify causal effects we use a novel strategy that exploits discontinuities in distance to the response station across locations next to each other but on different sides of division boundaries contrary to previous evidence we find large and strongly significant effects in our preferred estimate a 10 increase in response time leads to a 4 7 percentage points decrease in the likelihood of clearing the crime we find stronger effects for thefts than for violent offences although the effects are large for every type of crime we find suggestive evidence in support of two mechanisms the likelihood of an immediate arrest and the likelihood that a suspect will be named by a victim or witness both increase as response time becomes faster we argue that under conservative assumptions hiring an additional response officer would generate a benefit in terms of future crime prevented equivalent to 170 of her payroll cost

crime apprehension and clearance rates panel data evidence from canadian provinces the becker 1968 model of crime establishes the importance of the probability of apprehension as a key factor in a rational individual s decision to commit a crime in this respect most empirical studies based on us data have relied on variation in the number of police officers to estimate the impact of the probability of apprehension or capture we measure the probability of apprehension by clearance rates and study their effects on crime rates employing a panel of canadian provinces from 1986 to 2005 ols gmm gls and iv estimates yield statistically significant elasticities of clearance rates ranging from 0 2 to 0 4 for violent crimes and from 0 5 to 0 6 for property crimes these findings reflect the importance of police force crime solving productivity

commentary from capital landing to urban anchoring the negotiated city this commentary article proposes three ideal types of anchoring of finance capital into the city i e the way in which capital as it is valued in financial markets is transformed into real cap

income distribution and development some stylized facts in recent years the relationship between income distribution and the process of development has come under increasing scrutiny much of the debate has focused on the hypothesis originally advanced by simon kuznets that the secular behavior of inequality follows an inverted u shaped pattern with inequality first increasing and then decreasing with development this hypothesis has become so much a part of the conventional wisdom on this subject that it has generated considerable skepticism about the welfare implications of the development process indeed on some interpretations developing countries face the grim prospect not just of increasing relative inequality but also of declining absolute incomes for the lower income groups

financing property s contribution to regeneration attracting investment and finance into inner city and other renewal areas poses particular difficulties and is frequently reliant on strong public sector commitment through special incentives or other mechanisms to provide the conditions to lever private sector activity this paper initially links the concept of market failure and the rationale for regeneration and examines policy responses from uk european and us perspectives followed by a consideration of public and private sector financing approaches international perspectives draw particularly upon the use of tax based mechanisms in regeneration notably those used in the us in the european context the paper highlights implications for regeneration stemming from the interpretation of state aid rules and competition policy conclusions reflect upon the complexity of regeneration and the importance of the different stakeholders within the regeneration process

the approach of institutional economics this paper assesses the old institutional economics it emphasizes the importance of key old institutionalist themes concerning the necessity of habits and rules and the role of institutions a problem in the alternative theoretical program of the new institutionalism is the untenability of its assumption of an original institution free market or state of nature even optimizing behavior requires the prior existence of habits and rules although it still lacks a complete and systematic theory the evolutionary approach of the old institutionalists tackles the problem of the interactive relationship of actor to structure without analytical reduction to one or the other

the effect of court ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police arguably the most aggressive armative action program ever implemented in the united states was a series of court ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments my best estimate of the eect of court ordered armative action on workforce composition is a 14

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

third wave sustainability smart growth and regional development in the usa krueger r and gibbs d third wave sustainability smart growth and regional development in the usa regional studies increasingly concepts of sustainable development are finding their way into local and regional development strategies this is also true in the usa though not through the local agenda 21 process as is the case in much of the rest of the world the approach to sustainable development in the usa is a set of policy approaches collectively referred to as smart growth smart growth is sometimes referred to as a uniquely american variant of sustainable development in contrast to local agenda 21 smart growth has captured the imagination of american policy makers at all spatial scales many have lauded smart growth as a market based approach that promotes the tripartite concerns of sustainability this paper positions smart growth in the context of broader political economic change and scrutinizes its incentive based approach through a case study from the boston massachusetts regio

household strategies and rural livelihood diversification this article reviews the recent literature on diversification as a livelihood strategy of rural households in developing countries with particular reference to sub saharan africa livelihood diversification is defined as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in order to survive and to improve their standards of living the determinants and effects of diversification in the areas of poverty income distribution farm output and gender are examined some policy inferences are summarised the conclusion is reached that removal of constraints to and expansion of opportunities for diversification are desirable policy objectives because they give individuals and households more capabilities to improve livelihood security and to raise living standards

the financialization of business property and what it means for cities and regions halbert l henneberry j and mouzakis f the financialization of business property and what it means for cities and regions regional studies the papers in the special issue examine the strategies and practices of investors and their relations with other actors involved in the production of business property although the globalization of these activities has occurred largely in the last 10 20 years it has prompted marked changes in the geography of commercial property investment international capital has flowed to a limited number of favoured locations but because of the spatial fixity of real property local actors and institutions remain an important influence on investment decisions this poses challenges for urban development and regeneration policies that depend on private investment capital

why do increased arrest rates appear to reduce crime deterrence incapacitation or measurement error this paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence incapacitation and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduces all crime rates deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime empirically deterrence appears to be the more important factor particularly for property crimes jel k42