Development of an Asset Value Map for Disaster Risk Assessment in China by Spatial Disaggregation Using Ancillary Remote Sensing Data

The extent of economic losses due to a natural hazard and disaster depends largely on the spatial distribution of asset values in relation to the hazard intensity distribution within the affected area. Given that statistical data on asset value are collected by administrative units in China, generating spatially explicit asset exposure maps remains a key challenge for rapid postdisaster economic loss assessment. The goal of this study is to introduce a top‐down (or downscaling) approach to disaggregate administrative‐unit level asset value to grid‐cell level. To do so, finding the highly correlated “surrogate” indicators is the key. A combination of three data sets—nighttime light grid, LandScan population grid, and road density grid, is used as ancillary asset density distribution information for spatializing the asset value. As a result, a high spatial resolution asset value map of China for 2015 is generated. The spatial data set contains aggregated economic value at risk at 30 arc‐second spatial resolution. Accuracy of the spatial disaggregation reflects redistribution errors introduced by the disaggregation process as well as errors from the original ancillary data sets. The overall accuracy of the results proves to be promising. The example of using the developed disaggregated asset value map in exposure assessment of watersheds demonstrates that the data set offers immense analytical flexibility for overlay analysis according to the hazard extent. This product will help current efforts to analyze spatial characteristics of exposure and to uncover the contributions of both physical and social drivers of natural hazard and disaster across space and time.     

金融集聚、生产率增长与城乡收入差距的实证分析——基于动态空间面板模型

本文利用中国2003-2013年285个地级及以上城市的统计数据,采用动态空间面板模型实证分析了金融集聚对城市总体生产率增长及其内部城乡收入差距的影响,研究结论表明：金融集聚是促进城市总体生产率增长的重要推动力,同时也是导致城市内部城乡收入差距扩大的关键因素,这主要是因为金融集聚显著推动了城市居民人均收入水平的提高,而对农村居民人均收入水平的提升作用不显著。本文的政策含义在于,在城市金融集聚的扩散阶段还没有到来之前,政府旨在缓解城乡收入差距的金融政策可能会抑制城市总体生产率增长。     

Spatial approaches to measure subnational inequality: Implications for Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations expressed an interest in reducing subnational (i.e., province and state level) inequality. We propose using a spatial decomposition of the Gini coefficient (SDGC) to track changes in subnational inequality. Typically, agencies do not track summary measures of subnational clustering of development indicators. Tracking changes in the SDGC can help measure and reduce regional inequality. To illustrate the use of the SDGC, we first present data for 93 nations to obtain cross‐sectional variation. Next, to illustrate how the SDGC trends over time, changes in the Human Development Index in Mongolia are compared to Russia and China. The SDGC can show improvement, decline and persistent clustering of subnational level inequality. The SDGC is a useful measure for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.     

Doing gender in the ‘new office’

This paper investigates how gender is performed in the context of an office setting designed to promote intensive, fluid networking. We draw on an ethnographically oriented study of the move of staff into a new office building constructed primarily from glass, and incorporating open plan offices, diverse collective areas and walking routes. Although the designers aimed to invoke changes in the behaviour of all staff, they conceptualized these changes in masculine terms. We therefore analyse the gender norms materialized by the workspaces of the ‘new office’ and how women responded to these. We suggest that the new office encourages an image of the ideal worker which brings together ways of acting and interacting that have been characterized as both masculine and feminine — active movement and spontaneous encounters, but also intensive face‐to‐face interaction and deep relationship‐building. Women are driven into this mode of working in an uncompromising, almost aggressive way, but a straightforward gender‐based dynamic does not emerge in their responses, with conventional gender characteristics being reshuffled and recombined.     

Testing spatial randomness based on empirical distribution function: A study on lattice data

In this article, we extended the empirical distribution function based test statistic _Ik$I_k$ of Skaug and Tjostheim [1993. Nonparametric test of serial independence based on the empirical distribution function. Biometrika 80, 591–602] in the time series setting to _Dn$D_n$ for spatial lattice data and derived the asymptotic distribution of the proposed test statistic _Dn$D_n$ under the null hypothesis of spatial independence. The size and power of the proposed test statistic under conditional autoregressive model (CAR) were simulated. We applied _Dn$D_n$, Moran's I and Geary's c   to the transformed and well-studied sudden infant death syndrome data from North Carolina and found that _Dn$D_n$ produced a much smaller p$p$-value in testing spatial independence.     

空间相互作用与城市经济增长--来自长三角的证据

基于以往研究对空间相互作用方向性考虑不足的事实,文章以长三角133个县市为例,构建了融合新经济地理学与中心地理论的理论框架,将表征空间需求关联的总体市场潜能细分为来自同层级、高等级、低等级三个方向,利用空间计量模型估计了总体及不同方向的空间相互作用对长三角地区人均GDP增长与人口增长的效应。结果显示：在控制空间依赖导致的间接溢出效应等因素后,并未发现存在要素价格绝对调整或要素数量绝对调整的证据,总体市场潜能的提高同时促进了城市人均GDP增长与人口增长;就不同方向的空间相互作用而言,大城市的自身发展有利于中等城市的人均GDP增长,大城市之间、大城市对下级城市、小城市对上级城市形成了人口增长的良性互动格局,而中等城市之间以及中等城市对大城市的人口增长则表现为回流效应。     

Combined asymmetric spatial weights matrix with application to housing prices

In this study, a combined asymmetric spatial weights matrix is proposed for capturing the unequal spatial dependence of housing prices, where the advantage of this matrix was demonstrated by a non-nested hypothesis test. To explore the heterogeneous spatial impacts of urban essential characteristics on housing prices over the eastern, central, and western regions of China, after the Lagrange multiplier and likelihood ratio tests, the spatial Durbin model using the proposed weights matrix was applied to each region. The estimation results showed that the direct impacts of college and new employment were significantly negative in the eastern region, but not significant in the central and western regions. By contrast, the direct impacts of hospitals and scenic spots were significantly positive in eastern China, but not significant in central and western China. In addition, the indirect impacts of the four variables were not significant in the three regions. These results suggest that in eastern China, the government may increase the requirements for using medical resources and close tourist attractions in a single city to cool down the skyrocketing housing prices in this area.     

Palm Distributions for Log Gaussian Cox Processes

This paper establishes a remarkable result regarding Palm distributions for a log Gaussian Cox process: the reduced Palm distribution for a log Gaussian Cox process is itself a log Gaussian Cox process that only differs from the original log Gaussian Cox process in the intensity function. This new result is used to study functional summaries for log Gaussian Cox processes.     

Residential mobility and the spatial dispersion of personal networks: Effects on social support

Using a representative national sample of personal networks, this article explores how the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and social support are linked. Three issues will be addressed here. Firstly, how is the spatial dispersion of personal networks related to individuals’ social characteristics, network composition and residential mobility? Secondly, how do the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and their combined effect influence the number and (thirdly) the structure of emotional support ties? Results showed that the extent of the support was affected neither by the geographical distribution of the networks nor by residential mobility. Living far from one's birthplace, however, exerted two distinct, and opposite effects on the support network structure. On the one hand, mobility led to high spatial dispersion of personal contacts, which in turn favored a sparsely knit network centered around the mobile individual. On the other hand, by controlling for the effect of distance between the contacts, we found that individuals that cited long-distance ties tended to be part of more transitive support networks than those that cited local ties. We interpreted the latter effect as evidence that transitive ties may survive greater spatial distances than intransitive ones. These findings are discussed in view of spatial mobility and social network research.     

城市空间关系问题研究——以黄冈与武汉城市圈内周边城市空间关系为例

城市化的快速发展使得城市空间关系不断变化,如何准确界定城市空间关系对城市战略选择至关重要。本文在总结前人对城市空间关系研究的基础上,将城市空间关系分为依附型、竞争型、共生型、异质型四种。进而在此基础上以黄冈为案例,研究黄冈与武汉城市圈内周边城市的关系,并提出黄冈的定位和发展战略。