Area Development and Policy
Datos de la Revista
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editorial | Informa (GB) |
| ISSN | 2379-2949 / 2379-2957 |
| Scopus | 21100886530 |
| Wikidata | Q63871569 |
| OpenAlex | S4210206839 |
| MAG | 4210206839 |
| Sitio web | https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rard20/current |
| Total de publicaciones | 281 |
| Periodo de cobertura | 2016 - 2026 |
| País | US |
| Idioma | EN |
| Indexación | Indexada en Scopus |
| Citada por | 686 |
| Factor de impacto | 1.368 |
| SJR | 0.708 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.308 |
| CiteScore | 4.6 |
| Índice h | 12 |
| Índice i10 | 15 |
| Media de citas en 2 años | 0.0426 |
| Citas en políticas (Overton) | 2 |
| Participación femenina en la autoría | 37.0% |
Area Development and Policy aligns with development studies, an explicitly listed related area. It has regular, but not central, anthropological intersection, especially for critical development anthropology
Geography, Planning and Development · Nature and Landscape Conservation · Sociology and Political Science · Urban Studies · Public Administration · Asian Industrial and Economic Development · China's Global Influence and Migration · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Economic and Technological Innovation · Economic Growth and Productivity
Promoting entrepreneurship socio-ecosystems
The global pursuit of scientific excellence often steers science, technology and innovation (STI) policies towards high-tech domains, creating disconnects with the developmental needs of lagging regions. Using an in-depth case study of North Khorasan Province, Iran, this research explores the misalignment between global STI policies and local needs. It contends that such regions should prioritise place-based innovation rooted in local assets and …
Rural-urban migration in China
Since the 1980s, many rural Chinese have worked in cities in order to lift their households out of poverty. Yet, their needs and aspirations are not static and have evolved over the past four decades. In this paper, we use household and livelihood approaches to focus on people’s resources, strategies and desired outcomes. Based on narratives and stories of four Sichuan households who were interviewed multiple times between 1995 and 2024, we ident…
Branding creative cities
Research on creative city branding has expanded in recent years, yet the mechanisms through which organisational structure (OS) shapes branding outcomes – particularly alongside networking and financial support – remain insufficiently examined. Most studies focus on developed regions and present creative city frameworks without considering institutional constraints and socio-cultural specificities in developing settings. Adopting a critical persp…
Determinants of global value chain participation
Using data from 49 nations and territories from 2007–2021, drawn from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Multi-Regional Input–Output (ADB-MRIO) database, this study employs quantile regression to examine variables shaping participation in the global value chain (GVC), considering both backward and forward linkages for a comprehensive assessment. It explores how economic, political and social factors relate to GVC participation across different quan…
The Global South’s perspective on smart city development in Indonesia
This article examines the development of a smart city in Pariaman, a small city in Indonesia, a country in the Global South. Understanding smart city initiatives in the Global South is crucial, as existing literature predominantly focuses on the Global North, despite significant socioeconomic and cultural differences between the two. Using a qualitative approach, this study draws on both secondary data and interviews with seven senior officials r…
The World Bank and Ghana’s resilient development agenda
For over six decades, the World Bank has been a pivotal actor in Ghana’s development, yet the evolution of its role in shaping the country’s resilient development agenda remains underexplored. This paper argues that resilience, while only explicitly adopted in the World Bank’s report following the 2015 Accra floods, has been an implicit and enduring development objective of its interventions in Ghana since the postcolonial era. Tracing the Bank’s…
State capital in the energy transition
State-owned actors increasingly operate in global production networks (GPNs), yet host-state agency in strategic coupling remains underexamined. This paper develops an analytical framework to explain how strategic coupling unfolds between host states and foreign state-owned companies by integrating three dynamics: host states’ bargaining conditions via enabling, managing and embedding mechanisms, state-capital hybrids’ alignment strategies, and g…
Securitised development, popular politics and the authoritarian state in Pakistan
Asia in the transforming global economy
Digital transformation of leading firms and Chinese cities’ participation in GVCs
While existing studies have primarily examined the firm-level drivers and outcomes of digital transformation, little attention has been paid to its regional implications for participation in global value chains (GVCs). Drawing on a large, multi-source matched dataset, this study investigates the influential mechanisms of digital transformation on local participation in GVCs across different regional contexts. It finds that digital transformation …
Post-globalised regional dynamics
This paper explores how regional development is influenced by global production networks via the process of strategic coupling. It theorises the role of strategic coupling in shaping regional development, with a specific focus on the development of regional innovation systems and regional economic resilience. Building on this theoretical framework, quantitative-based regression methods are applied to measure the effectiveness of this mechanism th…
Where do digital entrepreneurs thrive? The geography of Douyin vloggers in China
Regional and spatial development perspectives
Changing network structures and differentiated competition in the global photovoltaic product trade
Agricultural class and technology dissemination
Tracing paths to internationalisation
The political economy of industrial diversification in a resource-rich country
This article examines why Iran, despite reducing its dependence on a single export commodity, remains locked into a pattern of ‘wrong diversification’ – dominated by energy-intensive, rent-based industries rather than capability accumulation and technological upgrading. Using a process-tracing approach that integrates statistical indicators, policy documents and 30 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, managers and experts, the study show…
Monitoring and evaluation of regional agricultural innovation in emerging economies
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) tools are key to the development of agricultural innovation systems (AIS). However, their implementation at the regional level remains a challenge in emergent economies with limited policy capacity. This study interrogates what are the key conditions that define the design, implementation and scaling up of M&E systems for regional agricultural innovation. Following a participatory action research (PAR) approach, we…
From transnational communities to trans-regional communities
Navigating informality
Rentiership, rent and (beyond) capitalist futures
Rentier capitalism, technofascism and the destruction of the common
Administrative decentralisation strategy and upgrading firm exports
The quality of exported products is a key indicator of a country’s firms’ international competitiveness. Using data from Chinese industrial firms and customs from 2000 to 2012, this paper examines the impact of the ‘counties power expansion’ reform on the quality of exported products. The findings indicate that as county-level governments gain broader administrative powers, they encounter increased pressure for economic growth, leading to two mai…
Evolving skill composition and regional economic resilience in a long run
More than geography
A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’
In 2017, a meme was born in a think tank in northern India: Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’. This meme quickly spread through the media, intelligence circles and Western governments. Within 12 months it generated nearly 2 million search results on Google in 0.52 seconds and was beginning to solidify into a deep historical truth. Stories can contain truths and falsehoods. Human emotions, including negativity bias, prime us to think in certain ways. …
Inclusive globalization
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framewo…
Globalizing capitalism's raggedy fringes
Thinking through Jakarta, this paper explores the possibility of decentring understandings of conditions of possibility for economic transformation across the post-colony by shifting the optic away from European-style Capitalism. Colonialism, racism and slavery enabled the hegemony of European-style Capitalism, characterized by nation-states and the rule of law. The bulk of the theorizing within geographical political economy elides alternative p…
Getting urbanization to work in Africa
The serious social and environmental problems and risks associated with large-scale urbanization in Africa are widely recognized. However, the potential for urbanization to strengthen economic growth and development across the continent has only recently been grasped. The stakes are high for efforts to ensure that urbanization reinforces rather than retards prosperity, yet urban policies are frequently ambivalent and piecemeal. The development tr…
On capitalism’s cusp
The paper presents a critique of persistent tendencies in (macro)economic theorizing to draw binary distinctions between states and markets, and between liberal-market capitalism and its (more statist) others. Against this dichotomous perspective, a case is made for conjuncturally sited investigations of reconfigured capitalisms and recombinant economic forms. The ambitious scheme to construct a ‘Greater Bay Area’ (GBA) in China’s Pearl River Del…
Banking ‘development’
In the post-2008 global economy, infrastructure development and financing have risen to the top of the development agenda, emerging as a contested field for global investments involving seemingly divergent interests, objectives, rationalities and practices. Whereas multilateral development banks such as the World Bank advocate the market-based public–private partnership aimed at attracting private finance and deepening marketized governance, Chin…
Macroeconomic geographies
In dialogue with Ray Hudson’s paper on ‘rising powers’ in globalizing capitalism, this review article reflects on the position and priority of these macroscopic questions in the field of economic geography, focusing in particular on the prospects for a reanimated political economy of uneven spatial development. Two themes are explored. First, the paper asks what it means to confront the problematic of rising (and falling) capitalisms, and why it …
Rethinking the East Asian developmental state in its historical context
This paper critically revisits the statist literature that stresses the central role of the developmental state in steering economic development in East Asia. Based on a critique of the existing literature on the state’s mobilization of financial resources and implementation of industrial policy between the late 1950s and the 1980s, it argues that East Asian industrial transformation must be situated in the peculiar historical contexts of favoura…
Variegated geographies of electronic waste
© 2017, © 2017 Regional Studies Association. A source of political conflicts, recurrent scandals and considerable geopolitical problems, electronic waste (e-waste) is a central challenge for contemporary societies. Drawing on Polanyian economic geography, this article provides a comparative reading of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme in China and France and shows that e-waste policy in China is not a replication of global north m…
Rising powers and the drivers of uneven global development
The emergence of the rising powers has been seen as heralding a fundamental shift in global economic geography. It can also be seen as the latest expression of capitalist economic development. I first consider theorizations of this development as combined, uneven and crisis-prone, with an ongoing tension between processes of differentiation and equalization. I then situate the rising powers in the context of successive patterns of global uneven d…
Repositioning Yunnan
China’s geoeconomic engagement with Myanmar derives from three Myanmar-related security concerns (social security along the Yunnan–Myanmar border, economic security for the global expansion of Chinese capital and energy security). To facilitate this engagement, Yunnan is repositioned as a strategic bridgehead. To understand this geoeconomic engagement, this paper examines two specific transnational projects: Yunnan’s agricultural investment in no…
Dependence not debt-trap diplomacy
Every few years in the West – in the media and in political circles – there is a moral panic about the rise of China. Africa often plays a central role in this: as a supposedly predatory China is counterposed against representations of hapless and powerless African victims. As Deborah Bräutigam notes in her paper, this currently takes the form of the meme of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’, which is largely unjustified. However, intensified relations of de…
Land governance and megacity projects in Lagos, Nigeria
This paper considers the land-governance (acquisition, compensation and resettlement) and physical planning (planning permits, development-control mechanism and environmental-impact assessment) processes surrounding Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) in Lagos, Nigeria, and the effects of the LFTZ on the lives and livelihoods of the inhabitants of indigenous communities affected by the project. The study revealed significant gaps in the payment of compe…
African dreams
This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multi-nodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what a…
Area development and policy
A series of significant recent trends in world development involve transformations taking place at multiple geographical scales. These transformations suggest that there are multiple pathways to development, that these pathways derive from the articulation and interdependence of governance structures/capacity and development models, and that these trends will lead to a radical reshaping of the international economic and political order. Our world…
Global value chains from an evolutionary economic geography perspective
The research agendas of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and global value chains (GVCs) have developed more or less independently from each other, with little interaction so far. This is unfortunate because both streams of literature have a lot to offer each other. This paper explores how, looking at four strands in the GVC literature. Promising crossovers between EEG and the GVC literature are identified, but also some missing links that ne…
Financializing Chinese cities
Current enquiries into the transformation of cities from ‘growth’ to ‘debt machines’ are largely based on studies of selected European and American cities where municipal governments temporally repackaged and rescheduled current fiscal problems by selling off city futures. This study of a recent episode of housing speculation in urban China identifies a distinctive trajectory in which the state has reshuffled financial resources sectorally and sp…
Deindustrialization in cities of the Global South
Recent research by economists has shown that deindustrialization is more severe in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America than it ever was in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Nevertheless, most research on deindustrialization is focused on the former centres of Fordist manufacturing in the industrial heartlands of the North Atlantic. In short, there is a mismatch between where deindustrialization is researched and …
Made in China 2025’
This paper examines how the state can facilitate the establishment of a domestic production network in new energy vehicles (NEVs), from the making of electric vehicle batteries and battery management systems to the manufacturing of NEVs. The case of China illustrates how a non-firm actor was able to create the largest NEV market in the world by implementing proactive policies for market creation and new industrial regulations for cost and range p…
The rise of China and its implications for economics and other developing countries
China’s economic development has been miraculous since its transition from a planned to a market economy in 1979. This article provides answers to six related questions: Why was it possible for China to achieve such extraordinary performance during its transition? Why was China unable to attain similar success before its transition started? Why did most other transition economies fail to achieve a similar performance? What costs does China pay fo…
The Silk Road goes north
Russia, the world’s largest country, forms a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Underfunded infrastructure and vast energy resources into which Western investment is now largely prohibited by US and European Union sanctions also make Russia a logical site for BRI projects. Two are currently under way: the Moscow–Kazan high-speed railway and the Yamal liquefied natural gas plant. These BRI endeavours build on recent Sino-Russia en…
Land acquisition in India
This article examines the contentious issue of land acquisition in India, focusing on the deeply regressive system in operation from independence to the mid-2000s that caused wipeouts for millions of families, the flash of resistance to acquisitions starting around 2006-2007, the creation of a new law in 2013 to enhance justice and rights, and an attempt in 2014-2015 to amend that new law. The central questions that arise from this process are: w…
Land-based finance and property tax in China
Over the last two decades, cities in China have relied heavily on the revenues from public land leasing to finance urban development. This source of revenue is not sustainable. To address this issue and a distorted housing market, the current municipal finance reform agenda aims to introduce a property tax on the ownership of private residential properties. However, significant hurdles exist as a majority of urban households have purchased housin…
Exploring the development prospects of Accra Airport City, Ghana
This study of Accra Airport City explores the application and potential of the airport-city concept in an African context, and reveals that besides implementing a national agenda of using public–private partnerships to raise Ghana’s competitive profile, the project sought to ensure proper use of space, ease congestion and expand revenue sources for the airport authorities. While the government initially provided favourable conditions for private,…
Empowering regional economy with a spectacular space
China’s leading city-region governments have actively pursued momentary economic growth and spectacular spatial development by hosting mega-events. The cases of the Beijing and Guangzhou show that mega-events have functioned as instruments (ab)used by municipal governments to expedite land sales, relocate old state-owned industries, and drive migrant workers and the urban underclass out of the city centre. Improved environmental quality was found…
Urban–rural integration drives regional economic growth in Chongqing, Western China
The recent experience of rapid economic growth in Chongqing Municipality in Southwest China shows that rural–urban integration can drive regional growth. In Chongqing rural–urban migration, rural–urban land conversion, infrastructure investment, agricultural restructuring, rural development and employment generation drive growth. These generic processes are profoundly shaped by the policy-driven investment dynamics and the specificity of the Chin…
Geopolitics of the Amazon
The Amazon region has seen major structural changes in which new actors (organized civil society, provincial governments and international organizations) have played a decisive role. Perceptions of change differ, reflecting different global, national and regional interests, and result in conflicts that make it difficult to implement proper public policies. Today, the Amazon is a region in itself, requiring a policy for the consolidation of its de…
Regional cultural diversity in Russia
About 80% of the population of contemporary Russia are Russians. The remaining 20% are members of more than 180 other nationalities. In spite of processes of ethnic assimilation throughout Russian history, many ethnic groups retain their cultural identities. Cultural diversity in contemporary Russian society is determined by the historically rooted structure of ethnic and cultural space, and recent international and interregional migration. Altho…
Getting urbanization to work in Africa
The serious social and environmental problems and risks associated with large-scale urbanization in Africa are widely recognized. However, the potential for urbanization to strengthen economic growth and development across the continent has only recently been grasped. The stakes are high for efforts to ensure that urbanization reinforces rather than retards prosperity, yet urban policies are frequently ambivalent and piecemeal. The development tr…
China’s evolving role in Apple’s global value chain
Using Apple’s 2015 published list of supplier companies and their subsidiaries, this paper analyses how one of the world’s most significant lead technology companies and its network of core and non-core suppliers have become increasingly embedded in China’s information and communications technology (ICT) global value chain. By mapping both the global networks and the networks within China of Apple’s supply chain, this paper provides insights into…
Area development and policy
A series of significant recent trends in world development involve transformations taking place at multiple geographical scales. These transformations suggest that there are multiple pathways to development, that these pathways derive from the articulation and interdependence of governance structures/capacity and development models, and that these trends will lead to a radical reshaping of the international economic and political order. Our world…
Population growth, land allocation and conflict in Mali
This study analyses the linkages between rural-to-rural migration as measured by rural population growth and land-tenure conflict in southwestern Mali. Land-tenure rules in Mali are characterized by legal pluralism, leading to ambiguity about who has legal access to land and thereby increasing land-related conflicts. Data from 69 communes (townships) show that communes with less land per person tend to have more land-related conflicts. However, l…
Social inequality, city shrinkage and city growth in Khuzestan Province, Iran
The phenomenon of urban shrinkage is found in developing as well as in developed countries but the patterns differ. In developing countries, socio-economic inequality can explain population mobility between cities. A comparative study of shrinking and growing cities in Khuzestan Province in Iran showed that social conditions in the former were significantly worse than in the latter and that these conditions played an important role in the decisio…
Multifamily housing construction in Russia
Housing unaffordability and unavailability are major socio-economic problems in modern Russia, and result from market failure to provide a sufficient volume of new housing at reasonable prices. About 29% of new newly constructed housing units are self-build single-family houses produced outside the market. Professional builders are specialized mainly in constructing multifamily houses, generally in urban areas. This study analyses the efficiency …
Innovation development of large companies in Siberia
Correlation analysis of the relationship between the development of large companies in five Siberian regions and regional and industrial innovation systems shows that region and industry both influence company development and provides support for the anchor tenant hypothesis in relation to the role of large companies in Russian innovation systems
Industrial upgrading and interaction between the advanced small south and China
Existing studies of late industrialization emphasize the significance of learning mechanisms associated with North–South linkages for the technological and manufacturing capabilities of the South. With reference to investments by Taiwan’s machine tool industry in China, this paper shows how and why a small and relatively advanced latecomer in the South (Taiwan) developed multiple capabilities by exploring and exploiting the technological and mark…
South–south mobility
This paper reports the results of a three-country study of the social, economic and health vulnerabilities of migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal living in India and of returnees. Overall, migration was found to be economically beneficial for those who succeed in the host labour market. However, it is associated with significant psychosocial and health vulnerabilities for most migrants in both communities. Further, migrants returning to their home…
Brazil
Migration and rapid demographic growth in large metropolitan areas in Brazil are associated with high levels of territorial and social inequality. Four indicators of an associated urban crisis are examined: inequality in housing conditions, per capita income and years of schooling; a poor (or lack of a) public transport system, urban congestion and traffic accidents; high levels of violence and murder and the rapid diffusion of diseases linked to…
Rising powers and the drivers of uneven global development
The emergence of the rising powers has been seen as heralding a fundamental shift in global economic geography. It can also be seen as the latest expression of capitalist economic development. I first consider theorizations of this development as combined, uneven and crisis-prone, with an ongoing tension between processes of differentiation and equalization. I then situate the rising powers in the context of successive patterns of global uneven d…
Inclusive globalization
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framewo…
Macroeconomic geographies
In dialogue with Ray Hudson’s paper on ‘rising powers’ in globalizing capitalism, this review article reflects on the position and priority of these macroscopic questions in the field of economic geography, focusing in particular on the prospects for a reanimated political economy of uneven spatial development. Two themes are explored. First, the paper asks what it means to confront the problematic of rising (and falling) capitalisms, and why it …
Reorienting the drivers of development
Advancing a holistic theory that explains emerging geographical configurations of the world economy is both ambitious and particularly arduous when it involves concepts without consensus – in their meanings and significance – such as rising powers, BRICS, and MINT. Yet, understanding global and uneven development of the contemporary variety is an urgent matter of policy and politics, as we face growing nationalist populism as one of the disconcer…
The Silk Road goes north
Russia, the world’s largest country, forms a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Underfunded infrastructure and vast energy resources into which Western investment is now largely prohibited by US and European Union sanctions also make Russia a logical site for BRI projects. Two are currently under way: the Moscow–Kazan high-speed railway and the Yamal liquefied natural gas plant. These BRI endeavours build on recent Sino-Russia en…
What matters for regional industrial dynamics in a transitional economy
Recent evolutionary economic geography (EEG) studies have argued that regional diversification emerges as a path-dependent process, as a region often branches into related industries, whereas unrelated industries have a high probability of exiting the region. Based on a firm-level dataset of China’s manufacturing industries during 1998–2008, this paper examines the entry and exit of four-digit industries at the prefectural level, and shows that C…
The post-Soviet evolution of the Russian urban system
An analysis of annual: city size data for more than 1000 cities in the period of transition from a planned to a market economy in 1991–2013 shows that: 1) predictions of the rapid growth of the urban system and of primary cities due to the introduction of market forces are not confirmed; 2) the city size distribution is almost unchanged; and 3) regression estimates reveal the significance of agglomeration economies. The results are consistent wit…
Rural banking in China
Four types of banking institutions responded differently to the drive to centralize Chinese rural banking operations. In 2009 city commercial and market-oriented banks had a higher density of outlets in economically developed than in less developed counties, as expected, while rural banking institutions had an unexpectedly higher density in non-agricultural than in agriculture-based counties. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the wholly state…
From temporary market to temporary cluster
This paper shows how the nature of a trade fair can change over time from a temporary marketplace and field-configuring event towards a temporary cluster and complex learning space. Drawing from market-oriented and knowledge-based conceptualizations of trade fairs that analyze the different dimensions, interaction processes between participants and impacts of these events, this paper suggests that trade fairs are highly flexible organizational fo…
Variegated geographies of electronic waste
© 2017, © 2017 Regional Studies Association. A source of political conflicts, recurrent scandals and considerable geopolitical problems, electronic waste (e-waste) is a central challenge for contemporary societies. Drawing on Polanyian economic geography, this article provides a comparative reading of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme in China and France and shows that e-waste policy in China is not a replication of global north m…
Empowering regional economy with a spectacular space
China’s leading city-region governments have actively pursued momentary economic growth and spectacular spatial development by hosting mega-events. The cases of the Beijing and Guangzhou show that mega-events have functioned as instruments (ab)used by municipal governments to expedite land sales, relocate old state-owned industries, and drive migrant workers and the urban underclass out of the city centre. Improved environmental quality was found…
Researching state rescaling in China
This paper foregrounds and evaluates the research design associated with the study of Chinese state rescaling. It first synthesizes the existing gaps in the original, Western-based state rescaling framework. It then explores how different methodological channels are integrated to support a revised analytical framework. Specifically, it presents the value of multi-sited comparisons through (1) the ‘extended case method’ and (2) the ‘concurrent nes…