Spatial Linkages and Urban Economic Development

Project Description

This research project, led by Professor Sergio Rey and Foundation Professor Luc Anselin, will refine the existing tools available to economic development practitioners by integrating state-of-the-art geocomputation and visualization methods into a practitioner-friendly decision support toolkit. This toolkit will allow for the monitoring of the level of spatial linkage between communities in an urban context as well as provide for comparative analysis with user-defined areas from across the country. It will rely on an extensive cross-sectional data set that will cover the entire set of census tracts for the United States over the decades of 1990-2000 and which is constructed as part of the research effort. Econometric analysis of this dataset will provide an important contribution to the current literature on urban economic development, which is dominated by cross-sectional case studies and coarser spatial scales.

ASU Project Staff

This research project will be carried out in the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation at Arizona State University by a research team led by Professors Rey and Anselin. Rey will oversee the overall effort and be responsible for communications with the sponsoring agency. Rey and Anselin will jointly develop the methodological component of the research, design the architecture for the software tools and direct the actual code development.

The supporting research team will consist of two graduate research associates and a research programmer. One graduate student will be actively involved in the development of the spatially explicit linkage measures and the spatial analysis of the resulting measures. The second will participate in the design of the architecture of the web-based delivery toolkit. Both graduate students will assist with data collection, organization and analysis. The research programmer will be responsible for day to day coding and testing of the software.

Funding

This project is funded by the Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration (EDA) under Investment No 99-07-13861.