Alov, I.N.; Petrović, M.D.; Belyaeva, A.M. Evaluating the Economic Sustainability of Two Selected Urban Centers—A Focus on Amherst and Braintree, MA, USA. Sustainability2024, 16, 925.
Alov, I.N.; Petrović, M.D.; Belyaeva, A.M. Evaluating the Economic Sustainability of Two Selected Urban Centers—A Focus on Amherst and Braintree, MA, USA. Sustainability 2024, 16, 925.
Alov, I.N.; Petrović, M.D.; Belyaeva, A.M. Evaluating the Economic Sustainability of Two Selected Urban Centers—A Focus on Amherst and Braintree, MA, USA. Sustainability2024, 16, 925.
Alov, I.N.; Petrović, M.D.; Belyaeva, A.M. Evaluating the Economic Sustainability of Two Selected Urban Centers—A Focus on Amherst and Braintree, MA, USA. Sustainability 2024, 16, 925.
Abstract
The study is devoted to analyzing the economic sustainability of the town of Amherst, MA. The city's top employer and core enterprise is the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with over 32,000 students and almost 2,000 staff members. Based on a literature review, a hypothesis was put forward that a university city should have a high level of economic sustainability. To assess economic sustainability, the USCESI Index was developed. It evaluates sustainability in three groups of parameters: society, economy, and ecology. The first group includes the level of racial diversity, the level of education of the population, and the access to medical services. The second group consists of the Gini coefficient by income level, the median cost of housing, and the unemployment rate. The environmental situation is assessed according to the Air Quality Index developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. For comparison, the town of Braintree, MA, was taken. The USCESI was calculated for both locations. The analysis showed that both Amherst and Braintree have a high degree of economic sustainability. However, it was revealed that proximity to a significant economic center has a more powerful positive impact on economic sustainability than the location of a large university.
Keywords
economic sustainability; university city; socio-economic inequality; index assessment
Subject
Social Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
