A rather unique panel tracking more than 3300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania during 1991/4-2010 shows that about 1 out of 2 individuals/households who exited poverty did so by transitioning out of agriculture into the rural nonfarm economy or secondary towns. Only 1 out of 7 exited poverty by migrating to the big cities, even though those moving to the city experienced on...

South Africa is characterized by significant inequality in spatial economic activity. Whether future growth and development on a subnational level in South Africa will be such as to reduce this inequality may depend on the economic growth and development of South Africa’s largest cities. Our local economic growth empirics show some indications of conditional convergence in output between poorer...

The historic water towns in the Tai Lake Basin are representative of tourism products featuring a unique cultural heritage landscape and the local way of life in eastern China. Since the 1980s, this market has experienced phenomenal growth in both the quantity of water towns and the scale of tourist arrivals. Drawing from industrial economics theory and an agent-based modeling approach, we exam...

We sought to synthesize evidence of the health effects of construction of new roads by systematically reviewing observational studies of such effects. We included and critically appraised 32 studies. The review suggested that out-of-town bypasses decrease injuries on main roads through or around towns, although more robust evidence is needed on effects on secondary roads. New major urban roads ...

BACKGROUND The cause of coronary disease inframortality in Spain is unknown. The aim of this study is to identify Spanish towns with very low ischemic heart disease mortality, describe their health and social characteristics, and analyze the relationship with a series of contextual factors. METHODS We obtained the number of deaths registered for each of 8,122 Spanish towns in the periods 1989...

We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single, large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns.” We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproportionately from their firm’s own prior inventions...

Predicting urban growth is important for practical reasons, and also for the challenge it presents to theoretical frameworks for cluster dynamics [1–3]. Recently, the model of diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) [4,5] has been applied to describe urban growth [1], and results in tree-like dendritic structures which have a core or “central business district” (CBD). The DLA model predicts that th...

Background: Human is exposed to radiation in their environment with or without their consent and the exposure to natural background radiation is an unpreventable event on earth. Materials and Methods: An in situ assessment of the indoor and outdoor background radiation in Akwanga and Keffi towns of Nasarawa state Nigeria was carried out using a halogen-quenched Geiger Muller (GM) detector (Insp...