Comments on: “Alfred Marshall’s footnote”

By: kempton

kempton — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:49:34 +0000

I understand what you and Prof. Cheung are saying.

I am waiting to get my hands on U of Toronto professor Richard Florida’s new book “Who’s Your City?” which talks a great deal about clustering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida

I had a chance to listen to him at Banff last moth and he had delivered two tech talks at Google. By the way, Richard has a blog.

Agree with Florida or not, it is an interesting look at things.

By: chanwall

chanwall — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:39:01 +0000

I guess what Professor Cheung is trying to say is that some regions are very populated while some are not attracting people to stay. It makes sense for those ‘inferior’ regions to absorb more population by developing better local infrastructures.

By: kempton

kempton — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:33:47 +0000

There are some states in US and provinces in Canada that offer “negative price” (or subsidies) to attract different industries to locate at their region. Car manufacturers used to get subsidies and I think Dell computer got some subsidies to locate a call center in eastern Canada too (which unfortunately they closed down some months ago).

Interesting thought in the EU model. I wander if there are more competitions (and less cooperations) between regions in China?

I have some reservation with this, “一个困难是中国的人口分布可能过于集中在热门地带，而较为长远的发展，略为平均的人口分布可能较上算。” Looking at the population density of Tokyo, NYC, HK, I don’t know if they are worst or better economic arrangement.