Understanding the creative economy : a tale of two cities clusters

This article investigates underlying constraints within China’s creative economy. Drawing on two studies of creative clusters in Suzhou and Foshan, it identifies the importance of knowledge transfer and internationalization to the generation of higher value-added products and services. Both examples illustrate relationships between resources, activities, routines and entrepreneurship. The article argues that the examples notwithstanding, the vast majority of what is accounted for in data collection as China’s creative industries are more appropriately cultural industries. The focus on cultural industries drives local development and increases land values but the benefits are rarely dispersed internationally or into the broader economy.

Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed

In this article we present an alternative theoretical perspective on contemporary cultural, political and economic practices in advanced countries. Like other articles in this issue of parallax, our focus is on conceptualising the economies of excess. However, our ideas do not draw on the writings of Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share, but principally on Virilio’s Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology and Marx’s Capital and the Grundrisse.4 Using a modest synthesis of tools provided by these theorists, we put forward a tentative conceptualisation of ‘dromoeconomics’, or, a political economy of speed.

Analysing policy values in a knowledge economy

This fascinating handbook defines how knowledge contributes to social and economic life, and vice versa. It considers the five areas critical to acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge economy: the nature of the knowledge economy; social, cooperative, cultural, creative, ethical and intellectual capital; knowledge and innovation systems; policy analysis for knowledge-based economies; and knowledge management. In presenting the outcomes of an important body of research, the handbook enables knowledge policy and management practitioners to be more systematically guided in their thinking and actions. The contributors cover a wide disciplinary spectrum in an accessible way, presenting concise, to-the-point discussions of critical concepts and practices that will enable practitioners to make effective research, managerial and policy decisions. They also highlight important new areas of concern to knowledge economies such as wisdom, ethics, language and creative economies that are largely overlooked.

Cities and the Night-time Economy

Reports on the reemergence of a concern with planning city centers as focal points in the 1980s. De-industrialization of older industrial areas; Revalorization of city center sites; Emergence of city-to-city competitiveness at a national and supranational level.

Critical discourse analysis and political economy of communication : understanding the new corporate order

This article uses critical discourse analysis to analyse material shifts in the political economy of communications. It examines texts of major corporations to describe four key changes in political economy: (1) the separation of ownership from control; (2) the separation of business from industry; (3) the separation of accountability from responsibility; and (4) the subjugation of ‘going concerns’ by overriding concerns. The authors argue that this amounts to a political economic shift from traditional concepts of ‘capitalism’ to a new ‘corporatism’ in which the relationships between public and private, state and individual interests have become redefined and obscured through new discourse strategies. They conclude that the present financial and regulatory ‘crisis’ cannot be adequately resolved without a new analytic framework for examining the relationships between corporation, discourse and political economy.

Religion and economy : a comment

McCleary and Barro (2206) analyse whether Max Weber was right in emphasizing the religious impact on work ethic. Thery find a positive correltion between belief in hell and work ethic (p=0.98). They conclude that "Weber may have been right in emphasizing the religion link with work ethic"(p.71). Howevern they fail to explore the link to Max Weber's work on Protestant ethic as they don't explore for denomination differences. Weber's hypotheses would suggest that we would mainly observe an effect for Protestantism within a society. Thus, compared to McCleary and Barro's findings such a result is very much in line with Max Weber's link between religion and work ethic.

Health, endogenous time preference, and inequality : a political economy perspective

We study an overlapping-generations model in which agents' mortality risks, and consequently impatience, are endogenously determined by private and public investment in health care. Revenues allocated for public health care arc determined by a voting process. We find that the degree of substitutability between public and private health expenditures matters for macroeconomic outcomes of the model. Higher substitutability implies a “crowding-out" effect, which in turn impacts adversely on morality risks and impatience leading to lower public expenditures on health care in the political equilibrium. Consequently, higher substitutability is associated with greater polarization in wealth, and long-run distributions that are bimodal.

A political economy perspective on persistent inequality, inflation, and redistribution

In this paper we examine the dynamics of the link between inequality and inflation from a political economy perspective. We consider a simple dynamic general equilibrium model in which agents vote over the desired inflation rate in each period, and inequality is persistent. Inflation in our model is a mechanism of redistribution, and we find that the link between inequality and inflation within any period or over time depends on institutional and preference related parameters. Furthermore, we find that differences in the initial distributions of wealth can yield a diverse set of patterns for the evolution of the inflation and inequality link. Relative to existing literature, our model leads to more precise predictions about the inflation-inequality correlation. To that end, results in the extant empirical literature on the inflation and inequality link need to be interpreted with caution.

A study of green product industries in Taiwan

Based on the model of ‘The Smile of Value Creation' (Mudambi 2007) and the theory of concept marketing, this study aims to examine the top 20 Taiwanese environmental marks companies, and explore their circumstances, innovation patterns and value chain system in Taiwan. It found out all of them are information technology product and household appliances companies. In addition, they make special efforts in two parts of value creation: product (including basic and applied ‘R and D' (Research and Design), design, commercialization) and marketing (including advertising and brand management, specialized logistics, after-sales services). They also locate their branches depending on different stages of the value chain, and expand them globally.

Understanding legitimacy in a changing global economy

In a knowledge economy where technologically mediated information plays an important role, greater understanding is required of its impact on organisational sustainability. This paper examines the link between mediated information within a global economy and its relationship to a key to long-term organisational success– legitimacy. Aligning organisational legitimacy and the demands of a range of internal and external stakeholders is a central concern for managers when challenges to legitimacy continue to arise. Particularly during times of internally or environmentally driven change, challenges are created for managers seeking to ensure their organisation avoids questioning about its legitimacy. This paper presents the proposition that the perceptions of collective opinion derived from mass media provide a lens to a global world upon which managers base decisions to protect and repair organisational legitimacy. Legitimacy is determined from a broad social arena that can cross national and international boundaries (Lomi, 2000). Experience of legitimacy concerns, therefore, are often outside the traditional realms of managerial knowledge, and experience and of local business association networks (Aldrich, 1999). While the organisational landscape has been changing, at the same time, mass media have increased the focus on bringing news about events, and interpretations of events, from a broad and even global social area (Mutz, 1998). In addition, electronically facilitated media have exposed both organisational stakeholders and managers to views and interpretations of the world more quickly and more explicitly than in previous times. This paper proposes a relationship between perceptions of collective opinion derived from mass media and organisational legitimacy in such an environment.

Identifying aggregate demand and supply shocks in a small open economy

The standard Blanchard-Quah (BQ) decomposition forces aggregate demand and supply shocks to be orthogonal. However, this assumption is problematic for a nation with an inflation target. The very notion of inflation targeting means that monetary policy reacts to changes in aggregate supply. This paper employs a modification of the BQ procedure that allows for correlated shifts in aggregate supply and demand. It is found that shocks to Australian aggregate demand and supply are highly correlated. The estimated shifts in the aggregate demand and supply curves are then used to measure the effects of inflation targeting on the Australian inflation rate and level of GDP.

Rethinking regional green space networks in China

Ecological networks are often represented as utopian webs of green meandering through cities, across states, through regions and even across a country (Erickson, 2006, p.28; Fabos, 2004, p.326; Walmsley, 2006). While this may be an inspiring goal for some in developed countries, the reality may be somewhat different in developing countries. China, in its shift to urbanisation and suburbanisation, is also being persuaded to adjust its planning schemes according to these aspirational representations of green spaces (Yu et al, 2006, p.237; Zhang and Wang, 2006, p.455). The failure of other countries to achieve regional goals of natural and cultural heritage protection on the ground in this way (Peterson et al, 2007; Ryan et al, 2006; von Haaren and Reich, 2006) suggests that there may be flaws in the underpinning concepts that are widely circulated in North American and Western European literature (Jongman et al, 2004; Walmsley, 2006). In China, regional open space networks, regional green infrastructure or regional ecological corridors as we know them in the West, are also likely to be problematic, at least in the foreseeable future. Reasons supporting this view can be drawn from lessons learned from project experience in landscape planning and related fields of study in China and overseas. Implementation of valuable regional green space networks is problematic because: • the concept of region as a spatial unit for planning green space networks is ambiguous and undefinable for practical purposes; • regional green space networks traditionally require top down inter-governmental cooperation and coordination which are generally hampered by inequalities of influence between and within government agencies; • no coordinating body with funding powers exists for regional green space development and infrastructure authorities are still in transition from engineering authorities; • like other infrastructure projects, green space is likely to become a competitive rather than a complementary resource for city governments; • stable long-term management, maintenance and uses of green space networks must fit into a ‘family’ social structure rather than a ‘public good’ social structure, particularly as rural and urban property rights are being re-negotiated with city governments; and • green space provision is a performance indicator of urban improvement in cities within the city hierarchy and remains quantitatively-based (land area, tree number and per capita share) rather than qualitatively-based with local people as the focus.