Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
vary across industries and regions and over time. For these reasons, predicting the for-
tunes of individual regions is dii cult.
Regions themselves are not static entities but evolve over time as the endogenous
population of economic agents and their characteristics shift, and as those agents delib-
erately try to inl uence the organizational and institutional environment within which
they operate. That environment might be radically transformed by the development
of new technologies that alter the friction of distance, or as institutional controls on
borders and trade relax, redrawing the boundaries of the selection environment, perhaps
exposing businesses to one another that formerly competed in separate spaces. In this
way, regions and institutional regimes themselves might be considered as emergent
properties of the process of capitalist competition. Indeed, as characteristic bundles of
agents and place-specii c attributes, regions increasingly become central to the strategies
of economic agents, as spaces of contestation with resources to control, or when condi-
tions dictate as spaces that can be remapped, shifting the boundaries of competition in
particular directions.
Figure 2.3 depicts a situation where at time
t
two regions with distinct selection envi-
ronments (here shown in technology space) merge at time
t
+ 1 into one new region that
forms a single selection environment within which all plants compete. Such change has
been created by political shifts, most clearly perhaps in the case of the reunii cation of
Germany (see Grabher and Stark, 1997), but it is more commonly the result of transport
and communications improvements that have led to formerly independent economies
being exposed to one another through trade. Consolidation of trade relations often
heralds price adjustments, a remapping of the competitive standing of individual busi-
nesses, institutional conl ict, shifts in markets and consequent changes in industrial scale
and structure as capital is moved between sectors and spaces to exploit new opportuni-
ties for proi t.
Selection environments, as spaces of competition, evolve through time along with
the population of political and economic agents that help shape them. Selection envi-
1.00
REGION 1
TIME
t
0.75
REGION 2
TIME
t
0.50
0.25
REGIONS 1 + 2
TIME
t
+ 1
0.00
0.00
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
LABOR INPUT COEFFICIENT
Figure 2
.
3
Merger of formerly independent selection environments
