Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access originally published online on June 27, 2007
Journal of Economic Geography 2007 7(5):549-571; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbm022
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Exploring evolutionary economic geographies
*Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK. email < j.essletzbichler{at}ucl.ac.uk>
**Department of Geography, Bunche Hall 1255, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524, USA. email < rigby{at}geog.ucla.edu>
Evolutionary approaches in economics have gathered increasing support over the last 25 years. Despite an impressive body of literature, economists are still far from formulating a coherent research paradigm. The multitude of approaches in evolutionary economics poses problems for the development of an evolutionary economic geography. For the most part, evolutionary economic geography imports selective concepts from evolutionary biology and economics and applies those concepts to specific problems within economic geography. We discuss a number of problems with this approach and suggest that a more powerful and appealing alternative requires the development of theoretically consistent models of evolutionary processes. This article outlines the contours of an evolutionary model of economic dynamics where economic agents are located in different geographical spaces. We seek to show how competition between those agents, based on the core evolutionary principles of variety, selection and retention, may produce distinct economic regions sharing properties that differentiate them from competitors elsewhere. These arguments are extended to illustrate how the emergent properties of economic agents and places co-evolve and lead to different trajectories of economic development over space.
Keywords: evolutionary economics, economic geography, Generalized Darwinism, biological metaphors, self-organization
Date submitted: 15 September 2006
Date accepted: 20 February 2007
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