Geography 350 / Spring 2001
1. There are two "parts" to this short-answer examination.
2. Don't necessarily select the "easiest-looking" questions. Select those
which, in your judgment, give you the best and most balanced (incl.
non-repetitive) opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of
class-related concepts and tools.
3. Please define the crucial concepts before you begin to establish any
relationships between concepts or make any analytical or explanatory
suggestions. In general, such definitions will count for about 1/3 of the
points. However, the remaining 2/3 cannot be given unless the important
concepts have been defined.
4. You are encouraged to use examples whenever appropriate. However, use
examples only AFTER you made the point or developed the argument for which
you want to present an example.
5. Please write sufficiently legibly so that I can give you credit for
your knowledge, insights and wisdom.
Part I: Appetizers: (20 minutes or points)
Explain the analytical significance of (i.e. not just define)
five of the following concepts:
- Collapsed row model (Tiebout)
- Engel's Law
- Leontief coefficient
- b'ij coefficient (as different from a bij
- General fertility rate
- Import substitution
- Alpha index (in network analysis)
Part II: 40 minutes (select two questions, 20 points or minutes
You have been hired as a regional economic policy analyst &
personal advisor to accompany the
State's governor to the National Governors Economic Conference. You are
thrust into the following situations:
- Your boss has overheard two fellow governors discuss
policies and would like to know from you
- what the advantages and disadvantages of such a policy may be
for your state; and
- how one can measure and thereby monitor the degree of
diversification. It seems that the Gov has heard about the "location
quotient" but does not know how to apply the LQ to the measurement of
diversification. Besides, he prefers a single-number measure,
something he can call a diversification- or specialization index. He also
has heard about Input-Output analysis and wonders how that might help
- On the second day, a speaker presents the results of a comprehensive
analysis which made clear that some states benefited at the expense of
others, i.e. that economic activities had shifted between states. Your
governor was pleased to discover that your state showed a quite
substantial positive shift, but had a hard time understanding what it
meant that the state had an enormous positive "differential" (or
"regional") shift component but also "suffered" from a negative
composition or structural
effect. The governor gives you 20 minutes to explain the difference
between these two shift components to him.
- On the last day of the meeting, Dick Conway, Seattle's nationally
known regional economic analyst and forecaster, makes sure that the
intellectually most demanding part of the economic conference
was left for last. Conway expounds the advantages of taking an
or income multiplier view of the state's economy when considering the
and cons of a state's economic strategies. The governors are initially
because they have heard in their college (macro-) economics classes of the
Keynesian multiplier concept, but fall quiet, after Conway suggests that
there is not one convenient multiplier but lots of different ones. Your
task is to help your boss to sort out some of the differences between
different kinds of income- or employment multipliers.