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One of the central predictions of the new economic geography (NEG) is that the removal of trade barriers and other such frictions should lead to the geographical concentration and specialisation of economic activity, both between and within nations. This prediction has been used to argue that as the European Union becomes more integrated, economic activity would become more regionally concentrated and specialised. Using relative entropy measures applied to a new regional data set for the period of 1985–2019, this paper finds that between 1985 and 2000 localisation and specialisation between European countries increased to some extent but with a widespread fall in specialisation and concentration within countries. After 2000, and particularly after 2007 and the Global financial Crisis, the spatial distribution of economic activities in Europe appears to have become more complex, with some degree of concentration, agglomeration and specialisation both across and within countries. Overall, however, we find little long-run support for the NEG prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The location patterns and organizational networks of both advanced producer services (APS) and cultural industries have attracted extensive attention in geography and other related disciplines. However, most research on these two sectors has examined each one in isolation, without paying attention on how they are engaged with each other. Drawing on a network analysis of the inter-firm service provision relationships between 245 cultural firms and their APS providers during the firms' public listing processes in mainland China, this paper presents a pilot study of the functional interactions between cultural industries and APS from a geographical perspective. Our purpose is to expand the research on these two economic sectors from the simple mapping and ranking of their individual industrial activities to an investigation of the city-based spatial relationships between them. The outcome reveals that while the leading cultural firms and their APS intermediaries have demonstrated similar location patterns across major Chinese cities, the spatial interactions and connections between them are much more complicated than their co-location tends to suggest. This paper enriches our understanding of the functions of local clusters and trans-local networks in the establishment of inter-industrial linkages between the different sectors of knowledge economies. The paper also sheds light on the impacts of institutional context on the (spatial) development of cultural industries in a transitional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the impact of housing affordability on the spatial distribution of productivity and wages. The key theoretical contribution is to phrase the problem as an issue of the composition (rather than the level) of housing demand and link it to heterogeneous preferences and characteristics of households. Using a simple simulation methodology, the study estimates levels of amenity values and wages that would make current house prices as affordable as they were in 1995 in all English local authority districts. Although average wages would be unlikely to increase if housing was more affordable, productivity across England would probably be higher as the spatial distribution of economic activity would change. The key conclusions are that (1) unaffordable housing has significant economic implications; and (2) policy aimed at improving housing affordability should consider targeting housing demand as well as supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home-based businesses represent a large and growing portion of the economy, though little is known beyond limited surveys. This paper describes a novel method of identifying businesses located within residences using parcel-level land use data across 15 counties in California and analyzes their evolution from 1997 to 2014, focusing on their distribution across neighborhoods. Home-based business represented nearly one in six businesses in 2014, and employment in home-based businesses outpaced overall employment growth 37 to 24% from 1997 to 2014. While home-based businesses are associated with both middle-income and wealthy neighborhoods, only in southern California were they associated with growing shares of single-family housing, low population density, and homeownership rates. While prior research emphasizes the importance of technologically and knowledge-intensive services across a variety of home working arrangements, this study reveals that the industrial composition of home-based businesses is roughly equally comprised of knowledge-intensive services and basic economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree of localization of manufacturing, defined as the excess geographic concentration remaining after correcting for both sectoral concentration and the agglomeration of overall economic activity, has recently, gained new techniques of measurement in the form of indexes and numerical methods. These techniques are illustrated, compared, and theoretically discussed to show that they are consistent advancements, but none is yet able to satisfy all desirable properties. The measurement of localization would be more interesting if it could be related to economic processes and not limited to simple observational aspects. In achieving this, there are a number of complications, which are reviewed in the paper. Among these, the choice of the right sectoral scale at which these measures have to be applied is normally given too little importance. The second part of this paper advocates that this is a complex issue, since no digit level is appropriate for all industries. Moreover, different aggregations of narrowly defined subsectors may be more suitable than the standard industrial classifications. This is supported by an exploratory analysis, in two British sectors, based on the investigation of possible localization reasons identified in recent taxonomies. As the many localization measurement techniques have become available, it is recommended that they be applied to sector studies, and not confined to countrywide extensive explorations of all sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a detailed study of the location history of eight software and information technology (IT) enabled service firms, with varying attributes such as age of firm, type of work undertaken, and ownership sited in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. These cases are used to relate urban restructuring occurring in the city of Bangalore to the strategic shifting of location of firms within the urban fabric. While IT firms cannot be strictly classified as producer services, it is possible to contextualise their location decisions in terms of other office-based economic activities, such as producer services. Findings from the case studies are examined in relation to urban growth theories of the 1980s and 90s, which were related to an expansion of the service sector in advanced economies. The literature discussed in this paper explains the role of growth in producer services in suburbanisation of office space and the development of 'edge cities' and 'suburban downtowns' as alternatives to and in competition with traditional city centres. Studies of office location and contact patterns indicate the retention of management functions in the CBDs, with a consequent relocation of routine office operations to these suburban office spaces. The findings from the firms studied in Bangalore indicate a reverse pattern of peripheralisation of control functions and a retention of routine production functions in the core urban areas. The limited need for face-to-face contacts with actors in the local urban economy and the export-related output of this offshore industry are contributors to this apparent reversal of location dynamics. The paper briefly concludes with directions for future research on such specialised service production activity that is often being located in cities of developing countries, and its impact on the urban structure of these cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a large sample of Italian manufacturing flrms over the period 2004-06, to investigate whether different types of agglomeration economies affect flrms' internationalisation choices. Tbe main novelty of the work consists in linking the hypothesis of flrm heterogeneity to the literature on agglomeration economies to explain flrms' approaches and forms of internationalisation. We analyse two types of agglomeration economies: localisation economies and related variety. Our analyses show that the higher the flrm's productivity level, the higher the probability it will engage in more complex modes of internationalisation and that localisation economies and related variety positively affect export but not the flrm's multinational strategy. We check the robustness of our results using a two-stage instrumental-variable multinomial logit model in order to control for potential endogeneity of agglomeration variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great majority of theoretical and empirical writing on economic globalization continues to focus on urban and semiurban regions, while largely ignoring the vast rural and peripheral spaces of the world. This paper uses research with small and medium-sized enterprises in remote regions of British Columbia, Canada, to develop a way of understanding the unique practices involved in `performing' global economic action from the rural periphery. Specifically, a framework based on insights from three theoretical approaches is advanced-relational network theory, an actor-network approach to distance, and complexity theory in economics-that, in combination, allow the capture of what is unique about efforts to `go global' from marginal geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the materialization of geographical knowledges in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of urban space where the latter is based on processes of compulsory land purchase. The specific context for the study is two recently planned commercial redevelopments for the south London borough of Croydon in the United Kingdom, and the arguments mustered in support of these proposals. The author identifies and discusses three principal sets of geographical knowledges, which he examines under the headings symbolic, biopolitical, and scalar. In each case, he shows that the knowledges have strong modernist overtones. The paper seeks both to understand and contextualize these historical connections, and to consider the contemporary political work performed by the knowledges in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic modes of political economic regulation impact provision for the parks system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Green spaces during Milwaukee's first liberal era consisted mostly of private properties accessible only to the city's elite and/or to those willing to pay a fee to drink in its boisterous bier garlens. Collective open space investment at the turn of the 19th century signaled the beginning of a second, decades-long era of Keynesian state provision for parks. A steady decline in that investment for Milwaukee's parks since the 1980s has provided the context for a set of new, yet seemingly liberalized governance experiments to emerge from the now defunct managerialist system. In this paper I employ regulation and regime theories in conjunction with thirty-six in-depth inter- views to argue that these new parks experiments hail the beginning of a third era in parks provision. The new era is marked by an apparently neoliberal shift in regulation for open space on the basis of state actions to market public parks provision to a multiplicity of private actors. It is different from the first liberal era because the state withdraws its fiscal commitment to parks but still employs them to continue its active role in environmental and-by extension-social regulation. A multiplicity of local parks governances are promoted in the name of environmental citizenship but are problematic because they form new and localized geographies of social reproductive discipline in the benevolent rhetoric of responsibility, choice, and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the making of Liberty Village as a creative hub in inner-city Toronto. We focus on the role of property developers and the Liberty Village Business Improvement Association in fostering the area's internal economic geography. Drawing on the literature on govern- mentality, we dissect how the production of a place identity requires both the production of new subjectivities and the exclusion of alternative actors and understandings of organization within the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore how one particular segment of the informal waste-recovery trade, waste intermediaries, is impacted by Hanoi's rapid urban economic and spatial change. Using survey and interview data I demonstrate: (1) waste intermediaries simultaneously gain and lose as a result of Hanoi's urban transition; and (2) the underlying forces of urban spatial change in different areas of the city are quite distinct, which will have a unique impact on the future of informal waste-recovery in Hanoi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a new blend of methods developed to answer the question of where creativity is in the city. Experimentation with new methods was required because of empirical short- comings with existing creative city research techniques; but also to respond to increasingly important questions of where nascent economic activities occur outside the formal sector, and governmental spheres of planning and economic development policy. In response we discuss here how qualitative methods can be used to address such concerns, based on experiences from an empirical project charged with the task of documenting creative activity in Darwin-a small city in Australia's tropical north. Diverse creative practitioners were interviewed about their interactions with the city-and hard-copy maps were used as anchoring devices around spatially orientated interview questions. Results from this interview-mapping process were accumulated and analysed in a geographical information system (GIS). Digital maps produced by this method revealed patterns of concentration and imagined 'epicentres' of creativity in Darwin, and showed how types of sites and spaces of the city are imagined as 'creative' in different ways. Qualitative mapping of creativity enabled the teasing out of contradictory and divergent stories of the location of creativity in the urban landscape. The opportunities which such methods present for researchers interested in how economic activities are 'lived' by workers, situated in social networks, and reproduced in everyday, material, spaces of the city are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds to a growing literature on the impacts of the growth in student numbers in the UK, by focusing explicitly on their spatial residential patterns and impacts on labour markets in cities. It shows that students are typically highly residentially concentrated and statistically the population of students shows a high degree of segregation from nonstudents, Turnover within student neighbourhoods is argued to be sufficiently high to cause significant neighbourhood and community disruption in many cities. Students are also shown to have very distinct labour-market characteristics, being highly concentrated within particular sectors and types of occupation. Here too they have the potential for wider impacts, including displacement effects in relation to other local young people from entry-level jobs and increasing the flexibilisation of working practices. Students are also distinctive in apparently being able to find work if they wish to, although the evidence suggests that this is probably marginally easier in more buoyant labour markets. There is much unexplained variation between cities, though, which suggests the need for more detailed local work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A good deal of research within the cultural turn in economic geography has sought to understand the relationship between economic activity and regional culture. This work encompasses an increasingly heterodox set of approaches to regional economic activity, from innovation studies to processes of embedding to accounts of regional learning and clustering, and an increasingly broad set of empirical cases through which these issues are regularly discussed. Only recently has the literature had much to say about the relationship between scientific knowledge and regional culture, however, or about the empirical experience of non-Western regional economic activity and forms of innovation within this. This paper seeks to further develop these two recent strands by bringing them together. Firstly it transposes the study of high-technology regional cultures to a developing world and socialist country context. I examine, as a case study, Cuba's Science Pole, a biomedical growth pole on the outskirts of Havana comprising some forty-two interlinked institutions and 14000 scientists. I show how a space for biotechnology was created and maintained outside of the capitalist milieu with which the industry has come to be associated in the West. More specifically, I reveal how the formal demands made by the Cuban state of this biotechnology endeavour paradoxically encouraged the development of a suite of informal and innovative scientific practices. To account for how this very different approach nevertheless resulted in a similar 'regional culture' of innovation to that found in high-technology regions in the West, I suggest we need to consider not just the structural components of regional cultures (labour mobility, attitudes to risk, etc) but also the forms of rationality that underpin such factors themselves. In order to do this I turn to some of the insights of the science-studies literature as to the epistemological foundations of processes of innovation and knowledge production, to argue that regional cultures of innovation are never just economic spaces, they arc also epistemic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates in economic geography have emphasized the need for a more explicit analysis of innovation processes at a sectoral or technological level. A great deal of attention has furthermore been devoted to connect the internal disciplinary debate with the wider discourse of the social sciences that deal with economic development in general and with the role of innovation in particular. In the present paper I argue that the field of the social study of technology (SST) can inspire research in economic geography in important respects: SST research has an explicit focus on the genesis of sociotechnical configurations; it has developed sector-related and technology-related multilevel theories of sociotechnical change; it has a strong emphasis on innovation dynamics and sector transformations; and finally, it has a focus on strategic planning in multiactor settings and thus favors foresight and participatory planning approaches in science, technology, and innovation policy. SST-inspired research could thus be an interesting partner for those approaches within economic geography that share some ontological starting positions with regard to actors, the role of institutions, and a coevolutionary and multilevel analysis of sociotechnical transformation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion has survived a period of comparative neglect in social science to become a topic of keen interest. Questions on religion are now often included in censuses and surveys. It does not follow from the perceived importance of the topic, however, that these questions yield useful data. The difficulties and limitations of using survey responses on religion, and the purposes that such information might nevertheless serve, are examined in this paper. The effects of religion may relate either to religious identity or to the degree of religious commitment (religiosity). Neither of these characteristics is easy to measure. The potential importance of religion means that demand for data on the topic is unlikely to disappear, however. Religion can affect age at marriage, marital stability, attitudes to family planning and desired family size, health and morbidity, and propensity to move, that is, fertility, mortality, and migration, the main topics of formal demography. It can also be relevant in various areas of applied population studies, including education, economic activity, social equality, crime, alcohol use, social attitudes, and social capital, making it a factor in public-policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern theoretical concepts in economic geography are used to try to explain the positive sides of geographical clustering of industries. Of the few theoretical concepts which are used to try to explain the negative sides of clustering, that is, the decline of old industrial areas, evolutionary regional economics, in general, and the lock-in concept, in particular, are promising ones. Lock-ins have been furthest developed by Grabher in his study on the steel and coal-mining complex in the Ruhr Area, Germany. They can be considered as thick interfirm, institutional, and cognitive tissues aimed at preserving existing industrial structures and therefore unnecessarily slowing down industrial renewal. It is particularly in regions with political lock-ins in which the legacy of manufacturing endures. On the basis of a study on the restructuring of the textile industry in Westmünsterland in Germany, in this paper I analyse whether these kinds of lock-ins can also be observed in regions with strong concentrations of the textile industry, an industry that strongly differs from the above-mentioned steel and coal-mining complex. I show that the impact of lock-ins can be regarded as relatively weak in the textile region of Westmünsterland. Partly because of that, industrial renewal has been relatively successful, which in turn has kept lock-ins weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although economic-geographical research has recently been the subject of ‘cultural’, ‘institutional’, and ‘relational’ turns that stress the situated, relational, and embedded nature of economic activity, these concerns are usually elaborated through analyses of industrial, not financial, circuits of capital. In this paper I address the neglect of the financial elements of production networks by exploring the geographies of some of the financial practices of a group of microbusinesses in Birmingham's Jewelry Quarter. I argue that the Jewelry Quarter is an important financial space for these firms and illustrate how their production regimes are produced and reproduced through different spatiotemporal financial relationships with suppliers, customers, and financial intermediaries. By contrast with the undersocialised treatments of agency that predominate in firm finance literatures in economics and finance, I illustrate the situated, idiosyncratic, and often very personal nature of the financial knowledges, practices, and networks that reproduce these firms. This financial ‘cut’ through the Jewelry Quarter treats firm finances as integral to firm behaviours and strategy and uses this vantage point to assess the potentials and predicaments facing these firms that are regarded as strategically important for the future of the Quarter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I critique the notion of ‘the creative class’ and the fuzzy causal logic about its relationship to urban growth. I argue that in the creative class, occupations that exhibit distinctive spatial and political proclivities are bunched together, purely on the basis of educational attainment, and with little demonstrable relationship to creativity. I use a case study of artists, one element of the purported creative class, to probe this phenomenon, demonstrating that the formation, location, urban impact, and politics of this occupation are much more complex and distinctive than has been suggested previously. The spatial distribution of artists is a function of semiautonomous personal migration decisions, local nurturing of artists in dedicated spaces and organizations, and the locus of artist-employing firms. Artists have very high rates of self-employment, boosting regional growth by providing import-substituting consumption activities for residents and through direct export of their work. Their contribution to attracting high-tech activity is ambiguous-causality may work in the opposite direction. Artists play multiple roles in an urban economy-some progressive, some problematic. I argue that artists as a group make important, positive contributions to the diversity and vitality of cities, and their agendas cannot be conflated with neoliberal urban political regimes. I show the potential for artists as a political force to lead in social and urban transformation and the implausibility of their common cause with other members of Florida's ‘creative class’ such as scientists, engineers, managers, and lawyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geography can be viewed as a large and growing network of interacting activities. This fundamental network structure and the large size of such systems makes the complex network approach an attractive model for growth dynamics modeling. In this paper the authors propose the use of complex networks for geographical modeling and demonstrate how such an application can be combined with a cellular model to produce output that is consistent with large-scale regularities such as power laws and fractality. Complex networks can provide a stringent framework for growth dynamic modeling where concepts from, for example, spatial interaction models and multiplicative growth models, can be combined with the flexible representation of land and behaviour found in cellular automata and agent-based models. In addition, there exists a large body of theory for the analysis of complex networks that have direct applications in urban geographic problems. The intended use of such models is twofold: (I) to address the problem of how the empirically observed hierarchical structure of settlements can be explained as a stationary property of a stochastic evolutionary process rather than as equilibrium points in a dynamic process, and, (2) to improve the predictive quality of applied urban modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing realisation among scholars and policymakers of the role of local contextual factors and circumstances in influencing the behaviour of key economic agents, including the entrepreneur. This approach has stretched the boundaries of academic inquiry welt beyond mainstream conceptualisations of economic agency as isolated from its setting. An assumption that underpinned research and policymaking in the new learning is that economic activity is typically socially embedded, which is generally taken to imply local embeddedness. In our paper, drawing upon the findings of extensive research in rural Cumbria, we question this assumption. We argue that in the context of rural Cumbria, the conceptualisation of locality may go beyond territorial notions. This argument does not support a return to the notion of the isolated economic agent, but advocates a move forward to the detailed exploration of the interface between agency and context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]