Doctoral Student
Wins Regional Paper Competition
For the second year in a row, a
SPP student has won the Barry M. Moriarty student
paper competition from the Southern Regional Science
Association (SRSA), an association of scientists
and educators with an interest in the application
of regional science theory. This year Ph.D. student
Lei Ding took the prize, which includes $500 and
the opportunity to present his paper, “The
role of infrastructure on regional economic growth:
The case of telecom in China,” at an association
meeting in Arlington, Va., in April.
The prize is awarded to the
student who submits the best paper in the area
of Regional Science. Last year, classmate Adam
(Guang) Yang received the award for his paper
about industrial clusters. Ding explained his prize-winning
paper: “I used a panel approach and I found
that investment in telecommunications in China
is significant. I also found that investment
in telecom promotes regional economic growth,
and investments in less developed regions are
likely to gain the most.”
Ding, who is from the northern
China province of Shandong, became fascinated
by this topic because he has witnessed the effects
of his country’s telecom boom. “It
is an interesting topic because this sector has
grown in the last 20 years. In the 1980s only1
percent of Chinese people had a telephone. Now
that number is climbing to 40 percent. That’s
amazing,” he said. |
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Ding won a Barry M. Moriarty
prize for his paper about infrastructure’s
role in regional economic growth. |
As
a student of policy, Ding feels obligated to investigate
how to best support the
growth of telecom in his country. “China
needs to develop policies for its telecom infrastructure,” he
said, adding, “Recently China made reforms to
encourage competition among telecom companies, but
this slowed down development. We need to rethink those
reforms because a market structure may not work in
less developed regions.”
Ding hopes to develop these ideas
further in his dissertation. “In
my thesis I also want to study the distribution of
the telecom infrastructure in China and look at the
effects that economic factors have on its diffusion
in different regions,” he said.
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