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Economic Development and Inequality: The Role of Cities and Regions

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 April 2022) | Viewed by 4360

Special Issue Editor

Department of Economic and Regional Development, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, 17671 Athens, Greece
Interests: regional development; regional policy; decentralisation; inequalities; well-being; disasters

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is widely known that national socioeconomic policies are built on the grounds of efficiency and equity. From an economic efficiency perspective, policymakers aim for high economic development and growth, and from an economic equity perspective, they aim for low interpersonal income inequality. Policymakers try to achieve both aims, because persistent low economic development and/or persistent high income inequality create a raft of social, economic, and political problems in a nation. Nevertheless, encompassing both the goals of high economic development and equitable distribution of income is not easy. Many countries cannot improve economic performance without increasing economic inequality, while others can reduce economic inequality but at the cost of low economic growth. The equity-efficiency relationship has been analysed and debated by many scholars and international institutions such as the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF.

The role of cities and regions is fundamental to the efficiency and equity of a nation and thus to the relationship between economic performance and equality. For example, large cities are an important source of national economic growth, but they usually cause the level of income inequality to rise. Both cities and regions are essential dimensions of the development and equality process. However, socioeconomic and political processes operate both at the national and at the urban and regional level.

This Special Issue focuses on the role of cities and regions in economic development and income inequality within a country. It welcomes well-founded empirical papers which explore the socioeconomic and political relationship(s) between national and sub-national (i.e., local, urban, and regional) characteristics and policies. First, this Special Issue aims to better understand whether and how sub-national characteristics, such as regional disparities, urbanisation economies, city regions, uneven spatial distribution of factors of production, local authorities, metropolitan areas, and rural and remote areas and islands affect national characteristics, such as national economic development, income inequality, unemployment, poverty and exports, and vice versa. Second, it aims to better understand whether and how urban and regional policies, such as land use housing and policy, town planning, urban regeneration, regional planning, regional competitiveness policy, and cohesion policy, affect national policies, such as welfare policies, social policies, health policies and education policies, and vice versa. Overall, this Special Issue intends to provide an understanding of the importance of cities and regions in a national economy.

Dr. Vassilis Tselios
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • economic development
  • income inequality
  • equity
  • efficiency
  • national economy
  • city
  • regions
  • national policies
  • regional policies
  • urban policies

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 828 KiB  
Article
Economic Sustainability and ‘Missing Middle Housing’: Associations between Housing Stock Diversity and Unemployment in Mid-Size U.S. Cities
by Chad Frederick
Sustainability 2022, 14(11), 6817; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14116817 - 02 Jun 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1923
Abstract
Single-family detached homes—the lowest-density housing type—continue to dominate the U.S. home construction industry. These homes are carbon-intensive and automobile dependent; the built environments they produce militate against civic relations and attitudes. Cities need to increase density, support multimodality, and develop social capital, but [...] Read more.
Single-family detached homes—the lowest-density housing type—continue to dominate the U.S. home construction industry. These homes are carbon-intensive and automobile dependent; the built environments they produce militate against civic relations and attitudes. Cities need to increase density, support multimodality, and develop social capital, but these issues are not propelling cities to diversify their housing stock. The objective of this research is to facilitate this shift by establishing economic arguments for increased density and housing diversity. Municipal-level U.S. Census data is used to explore the interurban relationships between diversity in housing stocks and unemployment rates in 146 mid-size American cities. A measure of diversity, Shannon’s H, is applied to housing stock and found to be strongly associated with lower unemployment for workers over 25 years old after controlling for measures of urban social burden. In contrast to the much-heralded “trade-offs” between environmental quality, social equity, and economic development, these findings suggest that the dense, walkable, low-carbon city, and the economically sustainable city might be the same place. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Development and Inequality: The Role of Cities and Regions)
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17 pages, 626 KiB  
Article
Through the Irregular Paths of Inequality: An Analysis of the Evolution of Socioeconomic Inequality in Brazilian States Since 1976
by Paulo Mourao and Alexandre Junqueira
Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 2356; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13042356 - 22 Feb 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1479
Abstract
Patterns of inequality tend to seriously undermine any attempt at economic growth policy when the inequality is perceived by significant groups of individuals as unjust, inhuman, and insurmountable. One country with a high degree of inequality has been Brazil (usually in the world [...] Read more.
Patterns of inequality tend to seriously undermine any attempt at economic growth policy when the inequality is perceived by significant groups of individuals as unjust, inhuman, and insurmountable. One country with a high degree of inequality has been Brazil (usually in the world top-10). Brazil had also witnessed strong dynamics of certain indicators, such as the Gini coefficient, over the last several decades. However, so far, such dynamics have not been properly analyzed, especially considering the significant differences across Brazilian states. For filling that gap, this study used econometric techniques specific to time series and tried to identify structural breaks in the series of Gini coefficients for the 27 Brazilian states since 1976. Results showed a tendency towards an increase in inequality until 1995, followed by a reduction in inequality since 2000. Some cases of Brazilian states were related to the absence of structural breaks, showing a maintenance of historical trends in the evolution of inequality, which raises important policies’ challenges. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Economic Development and Inequality: The Role of Cities and Regions)
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