Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, migration analysis, land use and urban development, interindustry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography that studies economic activity and factors affecting it. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics.
In general, a rural area or a countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities. Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas and areas with forestry are typically described as rural, as well as other areas lacking substantial development. Different countries have varying definitions of rural for statistical and administrative purposes.
One of the major subfields of urban economics, economies of agglomeration, explains, in broad terms, how urban agglomeration occurs in locations where cost savings can naturally arise. This term is most often discussed in terms of economic firm productivity. However, agglomeration effects also explain some social phenomena, such as large proportions of the population being clustered in cities and major urban centers. Similar to economies of scale, the costs and benefits of agglomerating increase the larger the agglomerated urban cluster becomes. Several prominent examples of where agglomeration has brought together firms of a specific industry are: Silicon Valley and Los Angeles being hubs of technology and entertainment, respectively, in California, United States; and London, United Kingdom, being a hub of finance.
An edge city is a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban, residential or rural area. The term was popularized by the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau, who established its current meaning while working as a reporter for The Washington Post. Garreau argues that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Other terms for these areas include suburban activity centers, megacenters, and suburban business districts. These districts have now developed in many countries.
Land-use forecasting undertakes to project the distribution and intensity of trip generating activities in the urban area. In practice, land-use models are demand-driven, using as inputs the aggregate information on growth produced by an aggregate economic forecasting activity. Land-use estimates are inputs to the transportation planning process.
Masahisa Fujita is a Japanese economist who has studied regional science, urban economics, international trade, and spatial economy. He is a professor at Konan University and an adjunct professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University.
A real-estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets, and it typically follows a land boom. A land boom is a rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then declines. This period, during the run-up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.
Articles in economics journals are usually classified according to JEL classification codes, which derive from the Journal of Economic Literature. The JEL is published quarterly by the American Economic Association (AEA) and contains survey articles and information on recently published books and dissertations. The AEA maintains EconLit, a searchable data base of citations for articles, books, reviews, dissertations, and working papers classified by JEL codes for the years from 1969. A recent addition to EconLit is indexing of economics journal articles from 1886 to 1968 parallel to the print series Index of Economic Articles.
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum – from emergency homeless shelters, to transitional housing, to non-market rental, to formal and informal rental, indigenous housing, and ending with affordable home ownership.
Spatial inequality refers to the unequal distribution of income and resources across geographical regions. Attributable to local differences in infrastructure, geographical features and economies of agglomeration, such inequality remains central to public policy discussions regarding economic inequality more broadly.
Economic restructuring is used to indicate changes in the constituent parts of an economy in a very general sense. In the western world, it is usually used to refer to the phenomenon of urban areas shifting from a manufacturing to a service sector economic base. It has profound implications for productive capacities and competitiveness of cities and regions. This transformation has affected demographics including income distribution, employment, and social hierarchy; institutional arrangements including the growth of the corporate complex, specialized producer services, capital mobility, informal economy, nonstandard work, and public outlays; as well as geographic spacing including the rise of world cities, spatial mismatch, and metropolitan growth differentials.
Rural economics is the study of rural economies. Rural economies include both agricultural and non-agricultural industries, so rural economics has broader concerns than agricultural economics which focus more on food systems. Rural development and finance attempt to solve larger challenges within rural economics. These economic issues are often connected to the migration from rural areas due to lack of economic activities and rural poverty. Some interventions have been very successful in some parts of the world, with rural electrification and rural tourism providing anchors for transforming economies in some rural areas. These challenges often create rural-urban income disparities.
Yehua Dennis Wei is a Chinese-American geographer. He is a professor in the Department of Geography and a senior scholar in the Institute of Public and International Affairs at the University of Utah. His research has been funded by the NSF, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Geographic Society, Ford Foundation and Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He has received awards for research excellence from the NSFC, Association of American Geographers' (AAG) China, Asian and Regional Development and Planning Specialty Groups, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Harry Joseph Holzer is an American economist, educator and public policy analyst.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to social science:
John Forrest Kain was an American empirical economist and college professor. He is notable for first hypothesising spatial mismatch theory, whereby he argued that there are insufficient job opportunities in low-income household areas. Kain is also notable for his focus on transport economics, for his long career of teaching at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as for founding the Texas Schools Project.
Yves Zenou is a French-Swedish-Australian economist. He is a professor at Monash University and holds the Richard Snape Chair in Business and Economics.
John Vernon Henderson is a Canadian-American economist and an academic. He is a Research Affiliate at the International Growth Centre, Director of the Urbanisation in Developing Countries Program, and a School Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics.
Franklin Obeng-Odoom is a Ghanaian-Australian political economist, specialising in urban and regional economics, political economy of development, stratification economics, and the political economy of natural resources. He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and Academy of Social Sciences.
