Abstract
Karen R. Polenske has been a very important and influential contributor to regional and interregional modeling in both the USA and China. Her work has extended to a whole range of regional growth and development issues, as well as to the extension of socio-economic modeling to embrace environmental linkages. The latter work was heavily focused on China with the novel use of enterprise accounts for an iron and steel plant that was further elaborated to address production systems at different technological and spatial scales and to consider the health implications of these operations. In this chapter, Geoffrey Hewings chronicles the remarkable perseverance that Polenske exhibited in launching and sustaining her career and then becoming an internationally acclaimed intellectual leader. She had a major influence in the creation and success of the North American Regional Science Council, and she became one of the first group of scholars to be recognized as Fellows in the International Input–Output Association, for which she also served as President. Her continuing influence in the organization of science extended to the training and mentoring of hundreds of Chinese scholars at MIT. A prize in her name, funded by her alumni, bears eloquent testimony to her remarkable commitment to fostering both Chinese regional economic development and successor generations of highly skilled regional scientists.
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Notes
- 1.
I recall a conversation with her in which she described how she had estimated national GDP by summing estimates provided by states; total GDP turned out to be several orders of magnitude higher than the official estimates for a variety of reasons, including double counting and incorrect assignment of establishment activity to individual states.
- 2.
Vanek’s reconsiderations for multigood/multifactor cases were left for future work.
- 3.
Professor Chen **kang, Polenske’s co-editor of the 1991 book, became Fellow of the International Input–Output Association primarily for his work in Input–Output Occupancy Analysis in which the usual I-O accounts were extended to include the use (occupancy) of assets.
- 4.
The list includes Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Ph.D., 1981), who assumed Director General’s position in the World Trade Organization in March, 2021.
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The comments of Amy Glasmeier, Faye Duchin, Nicolas Rockler, and David Plane are gratefully acknowledged.
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Hewings, G.J.D. (2023). Karen R. Polenske (1937–): A Journey from Rural Idaho to MIT. In: Batey, P., Plane, D. (eds) Great Minds in Regional Science, Vol. 2. Footprints of Regional Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13440-1_10
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