Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
countries and regions. To the extent that the world is culturally becoming
'flatter' (Friedman 2005), in the sense that democratic expectations and
demands for greater governance accountability are increasing, the increas-
ing statelessness of MNEs points in quite another direction. As such, while
the drive for better definitions of FDI (OECD 2008) along with better
corporate responsibility goals (OECD 2010) will help to improve nation-
MNE governance relations, the competition between regions and nations
to attract MNEs in order to foster innovation will remain fierce. As we
have seen in this topic, economic geography tells us that this competition
favours particular types of places over others, and therefore carefully
developed and integrated strategies are required (OECD 2011) in order
to allow less-advantageous regions and nations to gain a foothold in the
global MNE-mediated innovation networks. Evidently, the relations
between regions, nations and MNEs in today's global marketplace feature
both competition and coordination aspects, and balancing these some-
what conflicting demands will remain a difficult task.
The global-local tensions regarding the coordination challenges faced
by nation states and regions in the modern era of globalization have been
magnified by the global financial crisis of 2008, and the resulting Euro
crisis of 2011. Yet, as the 2011 Euro crisis has demonstrated, even the
European Union is too small to respond to some aspects of globalization,
responses which require coordination on an even larger scale. Movements
from the G7 to the G20 are small positive steps in this direction, but the
coming decades are likely to witness much greater changes in the archi-
tecture of global trade (Reyes et al. 2010) and finance from the structure
we have inherited from the second half of the twentieth century (Roubini
and Mihm 2010). The arguments in this topic suggest that a proper under-
standing of these changes cannot be achieved without explicitly consider-
ing the interrelationships between economic geography and the emerging
spatial distributions of knowledge, technology and innovation which
govern multinational investment decisions.
