Call for Submissions
PRSCO Award for Best Paper by a Young Regional Scientist

http://www.prsco.info/PRSCOAwards.html

The Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization (PRSCO) offers a Best Paper Award annually. The Award is aimed at encouraging young regional scientists within the Asia-Pacific region to participate in research within the PRSCO community and to achieve research excellence. PRSCO now invites submissions for the 2019 Award.

The Award will be made for the best submission to the PRSCO Best Paper competition by a young regional scientist, under the age of 35 (on December 31, 2019), who is from a PRSCO-relevant part of the world. The Award rules can be found on the PRSCO web site.

Papers submitted for the Best Paper Award should either have been presented to the PRSCO Summer Institute held in Bangkok in July 2019, or be planned for presentation at the PRSCO/WRSA Conference to be held in Waikiki, Hawaii, March 18-21, 2020. Papers will be assessed by a PRSCO Best Paper Selection Committee and the author of the winning paper is expected to be notified by January 24, 2020. The decision of the Selection Committee will be final.

Eligible authors who wish to submit a paper to the PRSCO Best Paper competition should email a pdf copy of their paper to the PRSCO Executive Secretary, Hiroyuki SHIBUSAWA, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., by no later than Friday, November 29, 2019.

Submissions should include a cover page with the paper’s title, the author’s full name, affiliation, and contact details. Award applicants should either: state that the paper is single-authored; or provide the name of the co-author(s), together with evidence that the applicant is the lead author and has contributed over 70 per cent of the paper’s content. The applicant should also affirm that they meet the Award’s age criterion.

PRSCO Award for Best Paper by a Young Regional Scientist
List of Winners
2015 Andrés Castaño Zuluaga (the Catholic University of the North at Antofagasta, Chile)
Paper Title “The Effect of the Spatial Density of Firms on Gender Wage Gap”

2016 Maria IKEGAWA (Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Japan)
Paper Title "Location Choice for Japanese Frozen Food Industry in East Asia Using Domestic and
Foreign Market Access with the Penetration Rate of Refrigerators"

2017 Juan Soto (Universidad Cat´olica del Norte)
Paper Title “Cities, Wages, and the Urban Hierarchy”

2018 Camila Alvayay (Universidad Católica del Norte)
Ppaper Title “Housing Demolition and Property Tax Delinquency: Evidence from Detroit”

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Greetings from Amity University, Kolkata and RSAi !!

We are pleased to announce the upcoming 51^st annual conference of the Regional Science Association, India. The Amity Institute of Environmental Sciences and Amity Institute of Social Sciences of Amity University, Kolkata, India is going to organize an international conference on Planning Sustainable Regions: The Social-Economic-Ecological Triad during February 13-15, 2020. Kindly find the attached first circular of the conference. We are appreciating your active participation in the said event. Kindly ensure wider circulation of the news among your colleagues, friends, teachers, and students.

Looking forward to meet you at Kolkata. Feel free to contact us.

Thanking You,

With warm regards

--

Organising Committee,

International Conference on 

Planning Sustainable Regions: The Social-Economic-Ecological Triad 

Amity University, Kolkata

February 13-15, 2020

51st Annual Conference of the Regional Science Association, India

More information: http://www.rsai.org.in/

Dear NECTAR friends,

Please find bellow two call for papers for the next NECTAR workshops:

* Cluster 2 and 7: "Social and Health Implications of Active Travel Policies”, Venice, Italy, 26-27 March 2020

* Cluster 5 and 6: "Regional Science and Tourism", Special Session for WRSA-PRSCO of RSAI 2020, Waikiki, Hawaii USA March 18-21, 2020 

Best regards

--

Ana Condeço-Melhorado

NECTAR Secretary

Special issue RSPP

Night Light Indicators of Regional Economic Activity

The rising availability of satellite photos and maps of night light as well as of day images of terrain from satellite or from earth bring new opportunities for regional science. Novel techniques of image processing and image data analysis enable getting new indicators of regional and local development. It applies to agriculture, city sprawl, urbanisation, regional inequalities, as well as to light pollution that impacts inhabitants and nature. This novel source of data, quicker and more detailed than official statistics or survey questionnaires can supplement and expand the existing regional research, in terms of diagnosis and policy setting.  

The goal of this special issue is to collect research papers on methodology and applications of night light analysis for regional science purposes. The special issue welcomes papers that show how these data can be used for regional studies and regional policy. We invite papers comparing the regional and local diagnosis with the use of image data and public statistics data and how the regional policy can benefit from this new source of information.

 Keywords and topics for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Light night maps
• Satellite imagery
• Google Street View Photos / OpenStreetPhoto
• Regional diagnosis
• Measures of development
• Tracking of dynamics
• Local and regional policy
• Image data vs. public statistics data
• Image processing
• Image data analysis

Case studies on Central Europe and Baltic countries of EU will be more than welcome.

Papers should be submitted to the regular review process of the journal until 10th May 2020 (https://rsaiconnect.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17577802).

The coordinator of the Special Issue is:

Katarzyna KOPCZEWSKA (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Workshop in Mumbai on Big Data and Methods in Regional Science

The five days’ workshop on methods in regional science took place in Mumbai from October 20 until October 25 organized by Prof. Sumana Bandyopadhyay from the Regional Science Association of India in collaboration with Prof. Abdul Shaban from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

The workshop involved more than forty researchers from different parts of India, Morocco, the Netherlands, the United States and Portugal. The event was excellent, enhancing teaching, learning and research experiences and diffusing a knowledge on methods in spatial analysis that are very effective in addressing issues in regional science and development.

Participants learn with each other how advanced methodological techniques apply to South Asia and Africa revealing new evidences and discussing how existing conceptual and applied models should be adapted to understand the dynamics of the slums in Mumbai; to perceive the behavior of criminals in prisons; and to grasp the challenges of urban transport and congestion. Adjusted frames of references to create more knowledge on the sustainability and resilience of urban and rural areas in their environmental, social, economic and institutional dimensions, to learn lessons of the circular economy in South Asia; and to find how poverty is evolving. Finally, to understand the technological innovations to improve urban management.

It was a kick off for a renewed regional science in South Asia, combining the science with policy with adequate methods and techniques.

Figure 1. Introductions

Figure 2. Opening address by Tomaz Dentinho

Figure 3. Speakers and organizers

Figure 4. Closing session by Jean –Claude Thill

I grew up in Toledo, Ohio and attended the University of Toledo (UT) which was located a few miles from where my parents lived. I majored in economics and after completing an MA degree in 1977, I spent a year teaching as an instructor at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). While teaching at BGSU, I lived in an older mansion in Toledo that had been converted to an apartment house and I met my future wife Mary Ellen who lived in the same apartment house. We moved to Boston in 1978 where I began work on a PhD in economics at Boston College, with fields in econometrics and industrial organization.

While working on my dissertation, Mary Ellen received a job offer to teach art in Toledo, so we moved back. I ran into a faculty colleague from BGSU while shopping who said BGSU was looking to hire an econometrician, so I applied and landed the job. My work on time-series econometrics led me to discover the wealth of regional labor market data, and a BGSU colleague, J. David Reed, introduced me to regional science which was a nice outlet for applied econometrics research based on regional data. I attended the Mid-continent Regional Science Association meetings in 1986 and 1987 with David Reed, and we co-authored work that was published in Journal of Regional Science, Regional Science & Urban Economics and International Regional Science Review. Around the same time a former professor of mine from UT, Michael Magura recruited me to work on a payroll tax revenue forecasting model for the City of Toledo as well as a metropolitan area leading indicator model for the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services. Magura was also a graduate of Boston College with a specialization in industrial organization, but I convinced him that regional science was an excellent outlet for our regional labor market forecasting work. We published work in Journal of Regional Science, Growth and Change, and Regional Science Perspectives.

I attended the Southern Regional Science Association meetings for the first time in 1988 to present work with David Reed, and in this same year, Mike Magura arranged a faculty position in the economics department at UT. After a few years of daily commuting to UT from Maumee, a Toledo suburb, I convinced Mary Ellen to move to a house within a few blocks walk of my office at the university. This was no small task as we had spent six years restoring a historic house in Maumee built in 1840, that included an art studio addition. My daughter Rachel was born in 1987, making the location close to my office important for family reasons.

Left to right: Badi Baltagi (Distinguished Professor, Economics, Syracuse University), Jim LeSage, Kelley Pace, Paul Elhorst and Yuxue Sheng (a professor at the Business School of Guangxi University, in Nanning, China) taken at LSU, Baton Rouge.

My first attendance at the North American meetings of RSAI was in New Orleans, 1991, where I met Luc Anselin and discovered spatial econometrics. Luc’s 1988 book Spatial Econometrics: Methods and Models was very intriguing for someone trained in econometrics, as was his Cornell University dissertation which was available in the UT library. In his dissertation, Luc discussed application of Bayesian methods to spatial regression models. I was working on Bayesian time-series econometric methods at the time and Arnold Zellner assisted me in obtaining a visiting scholar position at the Minneapolis FED bank in 1993 where John Geweke helped me understand new Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation methods. John shared his FORTRAN code which helped greatly in understanding implementation of these relatively new methods first presented in a 1990 article by Alan Gelfand and Adrian Smith. I began working on spatial econometrics in 1992, but my first publication in this area was a 1997 article in International Regional Science Review on MCMC estimation of spatial regression models. Luc Anselin expressed skepticism in 1997 about MCMC estimation because it was computationally much slower than maximum likelihood estimation, but advances in computing technology over time have made MCMC estimation competitive and useful in a great number of spatial regression settings.

The Spatial Econometrics Toolbox

By 1998, I was using MATLAB software for teaching econometrics and used a Sun Microsystems workstation in my office to provide a web site for students to download code and data. The website was publicly accessible, but I did not think anyone but my students would be interested in visiting the site. One day I received an e-mail asking questions about my MATLAB code from someone outside the US, which prompted me to think about the issue of having the code publicly available for a few minutes. Thinking about the generosity of others who shared their code and ideas with me over the years, and Luc Anselin’s early attempts to provide spatial regression software, I decided to make my code freely available, which gave rise to the Spatial Econometrics Toolbox. The number of toolbox functions increased over time and the volume of downloads required moving to a professional web hosting service. Paying for a hosting service to give away free code may not seem rational from an economic perspective but having accessible code has popularized the use of spatial regression methods in applied regional science work and increased the speed of diffusion for new modeling methods. By the year 2003 the websites spatial-econometrics.com and spatial-statistics.com (with code by Kelley Pace) were generating visits from over 250 users per day with 300 megabytes of downloads. Sharing code has an added benefit of allowing interaction with practitioners doing applied work which provides valuable insights into problems encountered and the demand for new methods to tackle these problems. I am happy to see that others such as Luc Anselin, , Roger Bivand, Gianfranco Piras and Serge Rey are making spatial regression codes available. In fact, software for spatial regression modeling is now available in Stata and SAS as well as MATLAB, the R-language and GeoDA, bringing these methods into the mainstream of applied econometrics. The new Journal of Spatial Econometrics from Springer will provide a forum for theoretical issues, innovative applications of these methods, as well as discussion of software and computational issues.

Collaboration with R. Kelley Pace

Another benefit of the website was communication with Kelley Pace who generously shared MATLAB code for some of his methods that were added to the toolbox functions. I first met Kelley in person at the Santa Fe NARSC Meetings in 1998, having only communicated via e-mail prior to that. One piece of advice I would give to young scholars is to find someone to collaborate with on research as this makes things much more exciting and increases productivity. During the more than 20 years since econometric and statistical expertise such as Christine Thomas-Agnan, Harry Kelejian, Olivier Parent and Tony Smith. Technical expertise tends to be very focused, so opportunities to work and learn from others helped expand the scope of my knowledge into new realms and greatly influenced my thinking about spatial econometrics.

Left to right: Badi Baltagi (Distinguished Professor, Economics, Syracuse University), Jim LeSage, Kelley Pace, Paul Elhorst and Yuxue Sheng (a professor at the Business School of Guangxi University, in Nanning, China) taken at LSU, Baton Rouge.

Participation in RSAI

It would be wrong to leave this account without saying something about my involvement with RSAI activities over the years. It is my view that during my career the discipline of econometrics has become increasingly focused on theoretical and frequently esoteric issues that pay less and less attention to problems confronted by practitioners attempting to use these methods to tackle applied problems. Ultimately, econometricians need practitioners who are interested in applying our methods, and we should make it easy to use our methods by providing code and documentation, applied examples, workshops and helpful advice. Regional scientists have been a wonderful audience for spatial econometric methods and rapid adopters of new methods. In fact, the need for new modeling methods in applied regional science practice probably exceeds the ability of econometrics researchers to provide new approaches required to tackle many important problems. I frequently receive requests for code to implement a spatial regression variant of some established non-spatial econometric estimation procedure. Practitioners do not fully appreciate the complications that arise in extending non-spatial estimation to address spatial dependence, especially in the case of spatial lag models. I would encourage young scholars with econometrics expertise to turn attention to work in spatial econometrics which has a large audience of practitioners interested in new methods.

After spending more than 20 years in Ohio, I received an endowed chair opportunity in Urban and Regional Economics at Texas State University. This 2006 opportunity was made possible with help from people who are leaders in regional science, like Luc Anselin, Manfred Fischer, Geoffrey Hewings, Harry Kelejian and Tony Smith. The additional resources and free time from less teaching activity that came as part of the new position allowed Kelley and I to produce our 2009 book. In looking back, I would never have imagined what a wonderful relationship with regional science would develop over the next 30 plus years when attending the Mid-continent Regional Science Association meetings in 1986 and 1987. Young scholars should appreciate the long run importance of attending scholarly meetings. For many years I self-financed trips to attend regional science meetings, but the payoff in terms of collaborators, stimulating ideas and discussions changed my life. I sincerely hope that participation in RSAI events has an equally beneficial impact on future scholars.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2019 November)

Dear all,

The new RSAI Newsletter November 2019 can now be found under

https://www.regionalscience.org/images/PDF/Newsletter%202019%20November.pdf

Dear RSAI members,

The yearly NARSC congress, this year organized in Pittsburgh, PA, is quickly approaching and as another exciting Regional Science event is getting nearer I would like to take the chance to update you on three recent changes in the RSAI Council composition.

At the Lyon Council meeting a very important decision has been made. The Council elected Prof. Eduardo Haddad as President Elect of the RSAI. Eduardo will become Vice President as of January 2020, and will work along Prof. Mark Partridge, current RSAI President, for the benefit of the Association. Good luck Eduardo!

The Council also elected a New Treasurer. Our former Treasurer, Prof. Francisco Carballo-Cruz, decided to step down after years of excellent service. The new Treasurer is Prof. Serena Eréndira Serrano Oswald. Serena is current President of LARSA, and has a vast experience in dealing with regional science matters both at national and international level. Welcome on board Serena!

Lastly, right after the ERSA congress in Lyon the deadline for submitting applications for being elected Councillor-at-large expired. We received three excellent candidatures, and the turnover in the electronic ballot has been really impressive, witnessing the great interest of the members in the associational life. The majority of votes went to Daniela Luminita-Constantin, Romania, ERSA. Daniela is a historical and founding member of the Romanian section of the RSAI; she successfully organized a RSAI world congress in Timisoara, in 2012, and we are all excited to have her on board. Welcome Daniela!

I look forward to seeing many of you at some of the next RSAI events. In the meanwhile, I am sure you will join me in congratulating Eduardo, Serena, and Daniela for their forthcoming new endevors.

Andrea Caragliu

Executive Director, Regional Science Association International

Eduardo Haddad

Eduardo A. Haddad is Full Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, where he also directs the Regional and Urban Economics Lab (NEREUS). He is a Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, Rabat, Morocco.

Eduardo Haddad received his B.A. in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1993, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign in 1997. In 1998 he held a post-doctoral position at the University of Oxford. He has served as the president of the Brazilian Regional Science Association (2008-2010), and as the first president of the Regional Science Association of the Americas (2008-2010). He was the Director of Research of the Brazilian think tank Institute of Economic Research Foundation (FIPE) from 2005 to 2013. Eduardo has spent the period January 2014 to June 2015 on sabbatical as a visitor at the Department of Economics (International Economics Section) at Princeton University, and at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy and Planning at Rutgers University. In 2017-2018, he was the Chairman of the Department of Economics at USP. Together with Professor Carlos Azzoni, he founded NEREUS in 2002.

Serena Eréndira Serrano Oswald

Serena is a full-time researcher in the "Culture, Politics and Diversity" Program of the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research (CRIM-UNAM).

She published more than thirty refereed publications, has organized 10 congresses at international level and 15 at national level; also, she has participated in 70 national and 45 international congresses.

Her research areas include gender, studies, identity, social representations, culture, motherhood, migration, politics, environment, peace and security, culture and regional development.

She has participated in 11 research projects and worked as a researcher, consultant, workshop worker, therapist and community facilitator, as well as in women's research projects for the pharmaceutical chemical industry. She is the founder of the NGOs Benguna Bee (Female Moon) and Tierra Joven. She is former President of the Mexican Association of Sciences for Regional Development (AMECIDER), and currently chairs the Latin American and Caribbean (LARSA) section of the RSAI.

Daniela Luminita-Constantin

Prof. Constantin is Full Professor of Regional Economics at the Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest and acts as Director of the Research Centre for Macroeconomic and Regional Forecasting of this university. In 2001, Prof. Constantin has formed together with her colleagues mainly from the Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest the Romanian Regional Science Association (RRSA). Since 2002 RRSA became member of the European Regional Science Association. In 2012 she coordinated the organization of the 9th World Congress of the RSAI in Timisoara. Daniela will take on her position as of Jan. 1, 2020.