Based on fieldwork in Egypt’s desert lands, this paper discusses rural childhoods in an area experiencing rapid social and cultural change. Since 1987, the Egyptian Government has made new villages in the desert as a means to increase agricultural production and solving problems of...

Die Reduzierung der Flächeninanspruchnahme stellt eine zentrale Herausforderung der Nachhaltigkeitspolitik in Deutschland dar. Mit dem 30ha-Ziel - bezogen auf die tägliche Neuinanspruchnahme von Siedlungs- und Verkehrsfläche - bis zum Jahr 2020 hat die Bundesregierung diesbezüglich eine...

Urban concentration differs across countries. One determinant of these differences is economic development, which first increases and subsequently decreases urban concentration. I condition the degree of urban concentration on the potential of countries to develop a balanced urban system. These...

Die Medien, die Öffentlichkeit und die Politik gehen seit vielen Jahren von einer demografischen Entwicklung aus, die für Deutschland nichts Gutes verheißt. Die Alterung der Bevölkerung bedroht die sozialen Sicherungssysteme, führt zu Fachkräftemangel und zu verdorrten Landschaften - so...

This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivityfor the Huguenots migration to Prussia. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in aunique data base. In 1685, religious persecution...

As emphasised in the beginning, the considerations presented here are very preliminary by nature. Nevertheless, some of the aspects discussed seem worth summarising. First, financial markets worldwide show a tendency of asymmetric regional " clustering" with newly emerging places challenging the...

International analysis of economic growth has confirmed the theoretical assumption that international variations in per capita income can to a large extent be explained by differences in the accumulation of capital and human capital and by differing rates of technological progress. However,...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...