Economic Geography

Theoretical advances
Research on jobs during the 1970s and 1980s revolved around the spatial divi-
sion of labor. Doreen Massey’s work was the lodestar, first expressed in Massey
(1979) and then in book-length form in 1984 (Massey 1984, 1995). My own
work in this vein used Dun and Bradstreet data to link corporate organization to
locations of R&D and new firm formation, activities in the early stages of the prod-
uct life cycle. I then turned to issues of entrepreneurship and of policy, summarized
in Malecki (1997).
Others, including Thomas and his students, drew upon the economics literature
to understand regional development and structural change, including shifts from
manufacturing to services, and the greater utilization of technology and knowl-
edge. A flurry of research on high-technology sectors ensued, which provided a
better understanding of the role of research and development (R&D), of routine
and nonroutine jobs, and of the corporate organization of multi-locational firms
(Malecki 1991; Watts 1981). The shift to services as the leading economic sector
in advanced economies remains difficult to study, since its outputs are frequently
intangible and national data-gathering has lagged. Yet those outputs have
become even more important and even more portable as digital files that can be
bought and sold, pirated, and transferred effortlessly. Bill Beyers, Peter Daniels,
and Peter Wood are among those who have led the way in research on services.
The language (or jargon) has changed a bit, but more fundamental aspects of
regional development are timeless. The uneven destruction of jobs and the
uneven creation of new ones will always be with us. The geographic scale has
certainly changed: multinational or transnational corporations were only begin-
ning in the 1970s to tap cheap labor pools in Asia and Latin America. Now,
global production networks and outsourcing are much more common, yet we
lack a full grasp of just which tasks, if any, might resist off-shore competition. In
other words, are there any economic activities that must (or are most likely to)
remain in advanced economies? Or are we doomed eventually to do little more
than ‘take in each other’s laundry’ and other personal services, while the most
profitable and beneficial work is attracted to the sources of the cheapest labor?
As an alternative, Pavitt (2003) provocatively suggests that systems integration,
comprised largely of what are typically defined as services, is replacing manufac-
turing as the dominant activity in global industrial firms.
Measurement issues – what is important and how do we measure it – were and
are critical. Employment, the most common measure of economic growth, is
highly flawed in the context of jobless growth, or rising productivity without new
jobs and in the realization that not all jobs are alike. Some are good jobs, with
prospects for long-term advancement; others are dead-end jobs with low wages
and little security in the face of race-to-the-bottom wage competition. Ann
Markusen (1994) has pioneered our research methodologies in this area, with
solid empirical work grounded in places.
A similar ambiguity holds for entrepreneurship and new firm formation: 
while many new firms such as Google exploit innovations and create new market

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opportunities, others are imitative and merely divide existing markets, especially
the case with franchised retail outlets. Indeed, the distinction between entrepre-
neurship as a response to opportunity, as opposed to a response to necessity, is
central to the benchmarking data collection effort of the Global Entrepreneurship
Monitor (GEM).
Interesting empirical insights have emerged from the edges of geography, by
people trained in other disciplines but who have embraced economic geography
and contributed greatly to it, such as the late Bennett Harrison, Richard Florida,
and Ann Markusen. They have been among the few researchers to connect economic
process to real places and to write for wider audiences (Bluestone and Harrison
1982; Florida 2002, 2005; Harrison 1994).