Economic Geography

Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen and Helen Lawton Smith

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of producer services, connections between society and the rise of the service
sector among others. During the 1980s and early 1990s, economic geographers
highlighted the fact that producer services are the key to understanding the 
basic function of services in urban or regional economies. After the mid 1990s,
economic geographers examined the role of producer services in global networks
and the characteristics of particular types of services. Daniels reminds us that: 
Research on the relationship between developments in information and
communications technology (ICT) and the supply, demand, quality and
spatial distribution services is far from exhausted, not least as offshoring and
outsourcing of both routine and higher-order service tasks presents economic
challenges to some developed economies and opportunities for newly emerg-
ing economies. 
David Angel offers how several topics attracted enquiries in environmental
economic geography: an examination of the evolution in patterns of environ-
mental regulation of firms and industries, higher level of scrutiny of firms’ activ-
ities around the world, and climate change and environmental challenges.
Currently, the approaches of study of environmental economic geography include
the greening of industry and the political ecology of industrial change. For the
greening of industry approach, researches are firm-centred and mainly fall into
three categories: consequences of changes in global production networks for
economic development, technological innovations and environmental perform-
ance, and flows of capital, technology, and information and the dynamic of
economic globalization. For the political ecology of industry change approach,
researchs are at the beginning of theorizing the process of industrial change,
which involves the flow of materials and resources as well as the flow of capital,
technology, products and services. The focus is more on the structural founda-
tion and social processes of industrial change.
Martin Kenney and Rafiq Dossani examine the potential implications of
advanced telecommunications and transportation networks for the reorganiza-
tion of global workforce. The recent changes in transportation and telecommu-
nication also have an impact on services, especially high-end services like R&D.
The impact on high-end services includes the need to redefine services, the 
relocation of services, and the unrestricted flow of digitized information. These
impacts will create new labour processes; economic geographers are ideally posi-
tioned to examine the spatial implications of such processes. 
Henry Yeung writes on the transformation of Asian economies. In the early
1990s, theoretical concepts in economic geography failed to capture the social
and institutional contexts influencing the internationalization of firms. Peter
Dicken introduced the concept of embeddedness in conceptualizing the dynamic
organization of business firms. The concept has been further developed and
subsequently resulted in ‘business network perspective’, which is utilized in
explaining the economic and non-economic relations at the intra-firm, inter-
firm, and extra-firm levels. Yeung has applied the above perspective to the Asian
Introduction: the past, present and future of economic geography
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context and calls for further research in understanding the complex interrelation-
ships in Asian capitalism.
The third section includes chapters by Martin, Asheim, Beyers, Watts, Glasmeier,
Lovering, Green, and Malecki on regional competitiveness. Ron Martin’s chap-
ter focuses on the contemporary issue of regional competitiveness, with its
antecedents in the pervasive phenomenon of geographically uneven develop-
ment. The distinctiveness of current thinking is that disparities in performance
are explicitly about competitiveness rather than ‘place’ competition. Martin
explains discourses of competitiveness highlighting the contribution of econo-
mists, and how regional competitiveness can be seen as an evolutionary process.
He argues that economic geographers have an important role to play in explaining
and critiquing the idea of regional competitiveness as a way of thinking about the
economic landscape and provides scope for economic geographers’ engagement
in public policy debates.
Björn Asheim writes about contextualizing economic geography, geography 
as a synthetic discipline, the co-evolution of Nordic economic geography with
institutional/evolutionary economics leading to an international leading posi-
tion when it comes to studies of cluster and innovation systems, and the applied
side of this in accordance with the third task. He reflects on the theoretical 
development of the discipline, discussing the role of abstract theoretization in 
a Marxist tradition which was used in the early 1980s, but which seemed to 
have disappeared with the transition from studying Fordist to post-Fordist
economic spaces. He argues that this is also related to realism as an epistemolog-
ical approach, that is, the relation between abstract and concrete research, and
the role played by contingencies in the economic spaces studied.
In ‘Approaching research methods in economic geography’, Bill Beyers
reminds us that there is no one methodological or philosophical perspective that
works for all. Each reader will construct for themselves their own approach and
each contributor has his/her own ways of utilizing methodologies to answer
research questions. Trained as a regional scientist, he values quantitative analysis,
formal models, and the use of theory to frame research methods. His own
research experience provides the following categorization: (1) approaches driven
primarily by methods or models developed by others; (2) exploratory research
motivated by pure curiosity; (3) approaches motivated by existing theories; 
(4) approaches driven by secondary data; (5) research driven by the development
of technologies; (6) research driven by unexpected outcomes; (7) research that
has value to the applied research community; and (8) collaborative research
between faculty and students.
Doug Watts reflects on how the spatial organization of production within
multi-regional firms has been theorized, empirically studied, and taught since the
1950s. He records that the economic landscape has changed as the contribution
to regional employment by large multi-regional firms declined while the contri-
bution of smaller firms increased from the 1980s, however, the large firm
remains a key actor in the global economic system and cannot be ignored in
understanding regional economic change.
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