Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
[E]arly i rms are put down by historical accident in one or two locations; others are attracted
by their presence, and others in turn by
their
presence. The industry ends up clustered in the
early-chosen places. But this spatial ordering is not unique; a dif erent set of early events could
have steered the locational pattern into a dif erent outcome . . . We might call this view
histori-
cal dependence
. (Arthur, 1994a, p. 50)
Thus the eventual spatial pattern of an industry is interpreted as being the outcome
of early (chance) events and subsequent spatially selective path-dependent cumulative
processes. Models of this sort have tended to focus overwhelmingly on how new indus-
tries emerge and develop across space, and have had little to say about how a given
spatial-industrial path dissolves, though the implication of the windows of locational
opportunity concept is that each new technological innovation opens up new windows
and hence new spatial coni gurations of economic development, so that 'the long term
evolution of the spatial [economic] system is potentially unstable' (Boschma and van
der Knaap, 1997, p. 198). How this relates to the observation that long-run patterns of
relative regional prosperity are often highly persistent (and path-dependent) over long
periods of time is not clear.
While these uses of the basic path dependence model in economic-geographic work
are certainly suggestive, they leave several issues still far from fully resolved (see, for
example, Table 3.1). Many of these have to do with how we conceptualise the meaning
and nature of path dependence within regional and local settings. Others relate to the
sources of path dependence and how far these are shaped by local conditions and circum-
stances, that is how far path dependence is itself place-dependent. Still others concern
why the degree of path dependence seems to vary across the economic landscape. And,
importantly, there are basic questions about what sort of economic evolution is implied
by path dependence: does it imply slow, incremental change and development, or a more
punctuated pattern, of successive periods of relative stability, even inertia, of economic
structures and technological development interrupted by episodic bouts of radical indus-
trial and technological change? It is on these latter issues that we wish to focus in what
follows.
4
3. In what sense an evolutionary model of the economic landscape? Path dependence
versus equilibrium
In much of economics, equilibrium rather than history has been the central organis-
ing concept in theoretical and empirical enquiry. The quintessential feature of this
'equilibrist methodology' (as Setteri eld, 1997, calls it) is that the development of the
economy is interpreted not as being shaped in any signii cant and persisting way by
particular events that occurred in the historical past, but as a movement towards a
hypothetical equilibrium outcome. The aim is to demonstrate how, under specii c given
(and typically highly abstract, simplii ed and idealised) assumptions (as to consumer
tastes, technological knowledge, the nature of competition, institutional arrangements,
etc.), an economy tends ineluctably and deterministically towards a limiting unique
ex ante equilibrium state that is invariant over time and space. The economy, in other
words, is conceptualised as an
equilibrium process
, which (following Harris, 2004) might
be depicted as:
Equilibrium process:
x
(
t
+ 1) =
F
x
e
(
x
(
t
)), −∞ ≤
t
≤ +∞;
x
e
= equilibrium point
