Regions and Cities at a Glance 2020 provides a comprehensive assessment of how regions and cities across the OECD are progressing towards stronger, more sustainable and more resilient economies and societies. In the light of the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the report analyses outcomes and drivers of social, economic and environmental resilience.

Recent technological advancements and other related factors and trends are contributing to the production of an astoundingly large and rapidly accelerating collection of data, or ‘Big Data’. This data now allows us to examine urban and regional phenomena in ways that were previously not possible. Despite the tremendous potential of big data for regional science, its use and application in this context is fraught with issues and challenges. This book brings together leading contributors to present an interdisciplinary, agenda-setting and action-oriented platform for research and practice in the urban and regional community. This book provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and cutting-edge perspective on big data for regional science. Chapters contain a collection of research notes contributed by experts from all over the world with a wide array of disciplinary backgrounds. The content is organized along four themes: sources of big data; integration, processing and management of big data; analytics for big data; and, higher level policy and programmatic considerations. As well as concisely and comprehensively synthesising work done to date, the book also considers future challenges and prospects for the use of big data in regional science. Big Data for Regional Science provides a seminal contribution to the field of regional science and will appeal to a broad audience, including those at all levels of academia, industry, and government.

In 2011 the World Bank—with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—launched the Global Findex database, the world's most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Drawing on survey data collected in collaboration with Gallup, Inc., the Global Findex database covers more than 140 economies around the world. The initial survey round was followed by a second one in 2014 and by a third in 2017. Compiled using nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults age 15 and above in over 140 economies, The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It has additional data on the use of financial technology (or fintech), including the use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct financial transactions. The data reveal opportunities to expand access to financial services among people who do not have an account—the unbanked—as well as to promote greater use of digital financial services among those who do have an account. The Global Findex database has become a mainstay of global efforts to promote financial inclusion. In addition to being widely cited by scholars and development practitioners, Global Findex data are used to track progress toward the World Bank goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The database, the full text of the report, and the underlying country-level data for all figures—along with the questionnaire, the survey methodology, and other relevant materials—are available at www.worldbank.org/globalfindex.

This is the first book to fully introduce a newly developed distance friction minimization (DFM) model, which is one of the new efficiency improvement projection approaches in data envelopment analysis (DEA). The DFM model can produce a most effective solution in efficiency improvement projections for inefficient spatial entities (decision-making units). The book provides a set of fresh contributions to a quantitative assessment of the performance of such policy entities. First it offers a state-of-the art overview of current DEA models and approaches, followed by the operational design of various new types of DEA models, each of them addressing weaknesses in traditional DEA approaches. Then it illustrates the assessment potential of DEA — and its new variants, in particular, the DFM model and subsequent extensions — on the basis of a broadly composed collection of empirical case studies, centering mainly but not exclusively on Japan and other Asian nations.

Spatially explicit data on the location of species across broad geographic areas greatly facilitate effective conservation planning on lands managed for multiple uses. The importance of these data notwithstanding, our knowledge about the geography of biodiversity is remarkably incomplete. An important factor contributing to our ignorance is that much of the biodiversity data are not readily accessible because they are dispersed across many institutions and often have not been digitized. This report documents our efforts to address these conservation planning constraints. We have compiled extant data on predicted species distributions and more than 680,000 occurrence records for terrestrial vertebrates and butterflies into a single digital database for general use in conducting geographically broad biodiversity assessments across a two-state area (Arizona and New Mexico) that defines the Southwestern Region of the USDA, Forest Service. These data represent one of the most complete databases on species occurrence to be compiled for the Southwest. Our objectives are twofold: (1) to document the types, sources, and characteristics of the data comprising the biodiversity database; and (2) to illustrate the utility of the data in addressing applied conservation problems across the Southwestern Region. We report on three case studies that illustrate how the data can be used to generate simple distribution maps using both point locations and predicted ranges, describe the patterns of species richness for seletected taxa across the Southwest, and provide an example of how managers may use the data to identify where potential resource conflicts may be par-ticularly important on National Forest System lands.