Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does? The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.

In recent years, regulators and businesses have struggled to keep pace with an onslaught of new technologies that has dramatically changed the world's telecommunications networks. This book gathers together research intended for those who must grapple with these changes -- the people who must decide whether and how to deploy new telecommunications technologies, and those who must regulate the technologies. The research is divided into three sections focusing on the past, present and future of telecommunications innovations. The first section, Lessons from the Past, examines what lessons concerning adoption and regulation can be learned by studying the diffusion of recent telecommunications technologies. The second section, Decision Making with Respect to Diffusing Technologies, examines possible improvements to the decision-making processes used by companies and regulators in the face of limited information and dynamic markets. The final section, Public Policy and Future Diffusion, examines public policy implications for future technologies.

Clusters - regional concentrations of related firms and organizations - are seen as being an important element of economic growth and innovation. But there is little understanding of how clusters come into existence, and little guidance provided on the role of policies that are conducive to the formation of clusters. Cluster Genesis focuses on these early origins of clusters. The case histories of well-known, established clusters, as well as more recently-developed clusters are discussed, including: · The Hollywood motion picture cluster, · Silicon Valley, · Boston and San Francisco biotech regions, · The Biotech industry in China, · Medicon Valley in Scandinavia, · The Irish ITC sector. Leading scholars contribute chapters examining cluster genesis, the divergent processes by which clusters arise, how multinationals contribute to cluster development, and how economic development policy may promote or hinder cluster genesis. Cluster Genesis uses a variety of methodological perspectives, examines a range of policy options, and draws on a number of rich case histories, and will be key reading for academics, researchers, and students of Economics, Innovation, Sociology, Geography, and Management Studies, as well as economic development officials and policy makers.

It is particularly appropriate that the AAG's Centennial Celebration should prompt the publication of a volume devoted to Geography and Technology. New technologies have always been important in advancing geographic understanding, but never have they been so thoroughly and rapidly transformative of the discipline as at this stage in geography's evolution. Just as new technologies have profoundly expanded both research possibilities and the knowledge base of other disciplines, such as biology, physics or medicine, so too are the revolutionary new geographic technologies developed during the past few decades extending frontiers in geographic research, education and applications. They are also creating new and resurgent roles for geography in both society and in the university. This trend is still accelerating, as the integration of geographic technologies, such as the global positioning system and geographic information systems (GPS/GIS), is creating an explosion of new "real-time, real-world" applications and research capabilities. The resultant dynamic space/time interactive research and management environments created by interactive GPS/GIS, among other technologies, places geography squarely at the forefront of advanced multidisciplinary research and modeling programs, and has created core organization management tools (geographic management systems) which will dramatically change the way governments and businesses work in the decades ahead. While these and other important geographic technologies, including remote sensing, location-based services, and many others addressed in this book, are forging new opportunities for geography and geographers, they also pose challenges.

This book focuses on East Asia, which has been attracting FDI and a centre of industrial agglomeration, and because of this, the production structure in the world has been dynamically transforming. This book analyzes this world trend and provides a framework for strategy that is required not only for Japanese local governments to implement industrial cluster policy, but also for firms to survive the global competition.