Geoscience Reference
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piece is rarely cited in modern literature; I have never seen any mention of it in the
wide and flourishing empirical literature on clustering, knowledge, creativity,
innovation and all that in space. I dare claiming that there is no fundamental idea
in this literature that is not already in Roscher. Even Marshall's (
1890
) famous
Chapter X of Book IV has less to offer in this regard than Roscher.
Gathering an enormous amount of information on industrial location, in parti-
cular for England and France, Roscher gives a detailed account of the factors
determining the location choice within each and every industry. Though the style
is narrative, a clear theoretical picture emerges during his tour through the eco-
nomic geography. He has a clear perception about what Krugman (
1991
) calls first
and second nature, illustrated with tons of concrete examples. Collecting the many
remarks and observations in the text would offer a fairly comprehensive view on the
theory of agglomeration. All the mechanisms summarised under the headings
sharing, matching and learning by Duranton and Puga (
2004
) somewhere show
up on the tour. Roscher is clearly much less convincing than Th¨nen with regard to
deductive theory, but richer in terms of empirical knowledge about industrial
organisation. Readers who, unlike me, are sceptical about neoclassical model
building and trust more in a style of research trying to extract regularities from
case studies as well as mass statistics are highly recommended to study carefully
Roscher as one of their great masters. What is particularly impressive is Roscher's
deep insight into the role of knowledge and creativity in the development of
industry, which was lacking in Th¨nen's work. I just mention his wonderful
exposition about the concentration of luxury industry in the largest cities, or his
observations on knowledge spillovers,
taking designers in Paris as a typical
example.
7.4
Launhardt
The author carrying on some of Th
¨
nen's achievements was Wilhelm Launhardt.
Reading Launhardt is a pleasure for an analytically trained economist of our days.
He wrote in a compact, rigorous mathematical style, which was strange for aca-
demic economists in Germany at his time. Like some of the best economists of the
nineteenth century—I just mention Jules Dupuit—Launhardt was a civil engineer.
He was born in 1832 in Hannover and became professor there 1871. When the
polytechnic was upgraded to a university in 1886, Launhardt became its first rector.
His contribution to our field is threefold.
First
, he reconstructed Th¨nen's spatial model in a rigorous mathematical way.
One may use it one-to-one as a modern textbook version, and a better one than most
of what I have seen. Launhardt also treats the case of endogenous prices with linear
demand at the central market and solves an example numerically, simultaneously
determining prices of goods, land use and land rent for the two-commodities case.
Launhardt's
second
contribution was about market areas with demand that is
linear in the consumer's price and uniform across one- or two-dimensional Euclid-
ean space (Launhardt
1885
,
27). Independently of Cournot, whose book he
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