Part of the UEDA Awards of Excellence Webinar Series

Bowling Green State University recognized that local economies are the building blocks for national ones. By recognizing the impacts of plant closings and mass layoffs in local social, political, and environmental events, this toolbox tries to bring a comparative space-time perspective to the understanding of unemployment impact. Spatial variations in unemployment across localities have long been the focus of policy initiatives by regional and local governments. On the theoretical front, local economic growth has been stimulated by ‘new economic geography’ or ‘geographical economics’, which adds a significant new dimension to analyzing the role of geography and location in economic phenomena. On the methodological front, economic development is increasingly being supported by the emergence of new space-time analytical approaches, with an explosion of interest in new models and techniques of spatial data analysis and GIS. Given the very current discourse regarding Economic Recession, Resilience and Recovery, this work will show how the development of comparative space-time analysis toolbox fit into this agenda.