The ability of households to withstand and recover from economic crises depends not only on their income but also – crucially – on wealth. Liquid assets safeguard consumption when income shocks occur. When a large share of households in a region lacks sufficient liquid assets, that territory becomes more vulnerable to shocks, undermining regional resilience. However, most regional poverty indicators remain income-based and overlook the role of wealth. This may lead to an incomplete understanding of household fragility: middle-income regions may hide fragile households, while some low-income areas may show temporary resilience thanks to liquidity. Despite this relevance, regional evidence on asset-based vulnerability is limited due to the scarcity of harmonised data at this geographical scale. This article proposes and applies a method of estimating the liquid asset poverty (LAP) indicator, defined as the share of households whose liquid assets are insufficient to cover three months of average expenditure. To generate comparable regional estimates, we construct a homogeneous framework based on Generalised Cross-Entropy (GCE) methods that integrate microdata from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), ensuring internal consistency across datasets. The LAP indicator produced at regional scale provides policymakers with an operational tool to identify regions particularly exposed to the economic and social consequences of crises. By uncovering structural vulnerabilities that remain hidden in income-based poverty metrics alone, LAP supports more accurate territorial diagnostics and contributes to the design of long-term, regionally targeted resilience and mitigation strategies.
Regional club convergence has theoretical foundations in neoclassical growth, endogenous growth, and spatial equilibrium. Still, only the latter explicitly accounts for prices, implying convergence in well-being or incomes after adjusting for the local cost of living. Subnational price variation persists due to economic and political geography yet has not previously been incorporated into club convergence analysis. In light of this foundation, we re-examine regional income convergence by adjusting for subnational price variation using Regional Price Parities (RPP) for 384 MSAs, 2917 counties, and 51 states (including DC) provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis for 2008–2023. We extend the period of analysis by using a CPI-based RPP index for 25 cities (1969–2017), which yields consistent results, despite the limited sample size. We find that adjusting incomes for subnational price variation generally reduces the number of divergent regions and centralizes the distribution of regions between clubs, consistent with spatial equilibrium. While price differences partly determine club membership in unadjusted data, their influence generally diminishes after adjustment, indicating that standard analyses partly capture price variation rather than true reflections of convergence in well-being. Our study underscores the importance of adjusting for subnational price variation in convergence research and advocates for broader RPP coverage over time and space.
Regional digital economy development lowers the cost of providing banking services across geographical distance, but its effect on local banking concentration is not unidirectional. Using nearly 820,000 commercial bank branch records and a provincial digital economy index for 31 Chinese provinces from 2013 to 2023, this paper applies a spatial Durbin error model to distinguish the absorption of local digital resources, exposure to neighboring digital capacity, and unobserved regional shocks. Local digital economy development is significantly associated with greater banking concentration, suggesting that digital resources may initially reinforce the competitive advantages of incumbent institutions. By contrast, digital economy development in neighboring regions is associated with lower local concentration, reflecting the external competitive pressure created by greater cross-regional service capacity. A three-regime model and bank-type decomposition further show that digital competition follows distinct financial-geographical pathways: local digitalization is more closely associated with the expansion of city commercial banks, whereas neighboring digitalization more often facilitates the cross-regional entry of nationwide joint-stock banks, potentially generating greater openness across bank categories alongside increased concentration within categories. The digital economy therefore reshapes not merely the degree of banking competition, but also the spatial direction from which competition enters and the organizational carriers through which it operates. Provincial banking concentration should consequently be interpreted in the context of cross-regional digital linkages.
Although the transition to the circular economy (CE) is slowly underway, business activities that contribute to the CE struggle to find sufficient space. Land is scarce and contested by multiple societal needs, and not just any place is suitable; CE firms are highly diverse, each with their distinct location requirements. To develop effective policies that secure and create space specific to the CE’s needs, in-depth knowledge about these requirements is necessary. This paper contributes to this debate by analyzing the locational preferences of four classes of CE firms in the Netherlands, namely those that contribute towards: the reduction of raw material usage, the substitution of raw materials, product life extension, and high-grade processing. Negative binomial and Poisson models are estimated for a sample of 14,129 neighborhoods, based on business microdata and spatial data on infrastructure, zoning, and agglomeration economies. The models show that infrastructure plays a smaller role than expected in CE firm location in the Netherlands, while the presence of business parks and the concentration of economic sectors in the area, such as the industry and energy sector, are decisive. The analysis confirms that location patterns of CE firms in reduction and extension are quite distinct from substitution and processing, highlighting the need to plan for a diverse network of business parks to stimulate circularity. Some combinations of location qualities are quite scarce, such as business parks in centrally located urban locations, suggesting that conservation and more intensive use of these location types is recommended.
