FIFTH  IN-CLASS  TEST

Name:____________________________________

Answer all the questions below, in the spaces provided (using the back of each sheet if needed).   The points total 51.  Your raw score will be multiplied by 0.392 to yield your score out of 20 toward the course total of 100.  You have 100 minutes.

Part A [13 points]:  Definitions (complete sentences not necessary)
development

economic development

environmental justice

environmental racism

extensive economic growth

intensive economic growth

natural increase

net migration

reserve

resource

projected reserve

tragedy of the commons
 

Part B:  Short answer
1.  [8 points]  An economic-base forecasting model can be expressed very simply as Q' = Q_b' (1 + a) , where the “prime” symbol (') denotes the value of the variable at a specific point in the future.
What’s Q?

What’s Q_b ?

What’s the formula for a?

Using this model for economic forecasting requires a number of assumptions.  Name one.

Explain two ways to determine the size of Q_b for a given region.

Explain two ways to forecast the size of Q_b'  for a given region.
 
 

2.  [8 points]  Write a set of “bullets” on the demographic transition.  What is it?  Characterize its four “stages,” each in terms of the two key variables and the third, resultant variable.  What’s the fifth possible stage?  Why might we expect the two key variables to change at different rates in a country, yielding the four-stage model?
 
 

Part C:  Essays
1.  [6 points]  Write a brief “conversation” between an environmentalist and an economist, each concerned with a rapid increase in the use of a non-renewable natural resource.  (To be creative, you might engage in single-sentence point-counterpoint, going back and forth three times.)
 

2.  [6 points]  Present an argument that economic development is an inherently polarizing process.  Present an argument that economic development is a process of diffusion of wealth.
 

 3.  [10 points]  Pick a region:  it could be one of the metro areas you studied in Exercise 2, or it could be your home region, or it could be some other region with which you are slightly familiar.  Suggest two strategies by which a national or regional government (or, perhaps, a collective effort of many businesses or many organizations in a region) could try to increase the rate of economic growth (or reduce the rate of economic decline) in that region.  Relate each strategy to our approach to regional economic analysis (i.e., the economic-base):  how would the strategy affect the basic or non-basic components of the economy?  Go further, to relate each strategy to one of the micro-economic models of activity location (location rent, cost-minimizing industrial location, central-place theory, market-area analysis) that we studied this quarter.