Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
central cities) to the
Decentralized Spread City
(1957 to the early 1980s) in an
increasingly affluent economy, to the contemporary (post 1985)
trends towards
agglomeration and metropolitan clustering of 'Knowledge Economy' activities
along the metropolitan regions in the Megalopolis.
Part IV offers a brief survey of (a) the various interactive technological and
institutional processes underlying the transformation of the Megalopolis and the
reinvention of major metro areas in the Megalopolis in recent decades as Knowl-
edge economies and hubs of creativity and (b) how such prepositions on structural
change and economic evolution offered here hold up in an empirical review of the
Boston Metropolitan Region's economic experience and its passage to a
'Knowledge economy' in the last three decades.
The literature on such economic transformation processes is highlighted here in
terms of (1) current theoretical formulations of the rise of the 'Knowledge produc-
tion economy' and (2) the contributions that the growing knowledge-intensive
business services make in the form of positive knowledge and productivity
spillovers to other industries in the broader economy. The scale and scope of the
growth and evolution of such knowledge-intensive production sectors over recent
decades in the Megalopolis and its component five large metro areas are presented.
Next, the vibrant growth and evolution of knowledge-intensive business sectors and
their functioning as knowledge, innovation, and expertise transfer agents in the
Megalopolis are highlighted.
Part V of this paper implements for the Megalopolis the Spence-Hlatshway
(
2011
)
national analysis
of economic performance in the last two decades of
“Tradable” and “Non-Tradable” sectors to capture their differential economic
performance in terms of how value-adding chains in an economic sector are
structured by global trade requirements and thus affect employment and value-
added per employee by sector. The performance of these two classes of sectors in
the Megalopolis metropolitan areas, which have high levels of knowledge-intensive
manufacturing and service sectors, and of global trade participation is presented.
There emerge
adverse income distribution implications
of this two sector economic
evolution and some inferences of the
widening income inequalities
in the Megalo-
polis metro areas.
Part VI concludes the paper.
18.2
Transport Networks in the Megalopolis: Their Evolution
and Economic Contributions
18.2.1 Network Evolution
Over the last four to five decades, the highways, railroads, waterways, ports, and the
aviation system in the Megalopolis have evolved from those serving the dense city-
based transport networks of the immediate post-World War industrial era to the
contemporary nationally integrated multimodal transport network enabling seam-
less transportation, serving a nationally integrated production system, and more
