Note—Planning for Industrial Estate Development in a Developing Economy
研究马来西亚某州政府如何在工业园区开发中兼顾经济增长与收入分配目标，通过线性规划模型发现实现分配目标的补贴成本远低于总收益，且最优政策对参数变化不敏感。
Since the early 1970s, it has been realized that rapid economic development in developing countries leads to an acute inequality in income distribution. To prevent massive dissatisfaction among their citizens, developing countries were urged to achieve economic growth (particularly industrial growth) with distribution of income as their development goal. A good way of promoting growth and dispersal of industrial activities is the establishment of industrial estates in the locations where such activities are desired. This paper formulates the problem of optimal development of industrial estates, with the incorporation of specified minimum levels of development in poverty (priority) sites as distributive targets, as encountered by a Malaysian state government. The linear programming problem so formulated is then shown to be equivalent to a transportation problem, enabling it to be solved and parametically analyzed efficiently. Computational results, obtained using real-life data, show that the subsidy incurred in fulfilling the distributive targets is small compared to the total revenue generated. This justifies the imposition of the distributive targets on the development process. Further, the optimal policy was found to involve decisions to be taken in the initial years of the planning horizon that are fairly insensitive to variation in demand and cost parameters, thereby demonstrating the relative “goodness” of the optimal policy for industrial estate development in the state.