Operationalizing the capabilities approach for urban policy evaluation: The travel welfare impacts of government job resettlement

Abstract

This paper operationalizes the Sen-Nussbaum Capabilities Approach (CA) towards measuring household travel welfare shifts after relocating government jobs to China's new towns. As a major type of urban decentralization practice, government job resettlement (GJR) programs have been implemented in several Chinese cities in an attempt to provide seed employment and population in new towns. Nevertheless, the travel welfare impacts of GJR programs are largely under-examined. In this paper, we make the first attempt by proposing a quantitative modelling approach to examining how households undergoing GJR programs have experienced changes in their travel welfare after job resettlement. We contend th..