Rise of Megalopolis as a Mega Knowledge Region: Interactions of Innovations in Transport, Information, Production, and Organizations - Regional Science Matters - page 365

and trust-promoting contexts, and its history of institutional innovations and
social cooperation. The rise of 'Tradable' and 'Non-Tradable' sectors in the
Globalizing Boston metro economy is, however, widening income inequalities.

18.1 Introduction and Overview

This paper documents the nature and scope of and the factors underlying the
economic structural evolution over the last three decades towards a Mega Knowl-
edge Region along the dynamic settlement corridor stretching from Boston to
Washington, DC in the U.S., christened by Jean Gottman ( 1957 , 1961 ) as the
Megalopolis.
The Megalopolis, stretching from the Boston Metropolitan Region in the north
to the Washington Metropolitan Region in the south, comprises some of the
country's oldest settled areas, locales of earliest industrialization, a key component
of the 'US Manufacturing Belt', and of early urbanization and of the densest mega-
urban region by mid-twentieth century. In the quarter century following 1950, the
metropolitan centers of the Megalopolis experienced industrial restructuring and
decline (with industrial enterprises spreading to other regions in US and abroad)
with declining shares of national manufacturing and total employment. However, in
the subsequent three decades to the present day, there has been a remarkable
reversal of regional economic decline and indeed a notable economic resurgence
in the metro areas of the Megalopolis. A variety of knowledge-intensive production
and service sector enterprises have arrived and continue to grow in the several
metro areas of the Megalopolis, which now represent large concentrations of high
quality human, cultural, and organizational capital, and of some vibrant contem-
porary 'Knowledge Metropolises'.
Specifically the aim of the paper is first , to delineate the nature and scope of this
recent economic dynamism in the Boston-Washington, D.C. (BOSWASH) corri-
dor, and second , to identify the role of improvements in transport (physical and
institutional) infrastructures in the above economic evolution over the last three to
four decades. The paper outlines the many economic mechanisms through which
transport investments in various transport modes support economic growth and
development along these transport corridors. While the important role of such
transport-induced improvements in corridor economic evolution is presented, that
is only part of the story of economic evolution in the Megalopolis. The third aim of
the paper is to present the argument that the economic evolution in the BOSWASH
corridor, in addition to transport factors, reflects the effects of several other
ongoing economic structural change processes. These include:
(a) The rise in the last three decades of Globalization —an explosive expansion of
cross-country economic interactions, division of labor, complex webs of
production chains, and a globally distributed production system—promoted
by institutional innovations promoting freer trade and investment and made
possible by physical and organizational innovations in Transport and