What goes on between regions and agglomerations in a globalized economy?

In earlier chapters, we developed an evolutionary perspective that discussed and took into account many of the resources, resource uses and actors involved in regional economic change, but where the relations within and between regions were kept constant. In short, what goes on within regions was seen as far more important than what goes on between them. Our approach reflected how evolutionary economic geography has developed so far, with a keen interest in how technologies in firms and industries change within regions, but with less consideration given to how links between regions change with globalization and why this is important.

This approach to regional change becomes more difficult to defend in the long run if the aim is to understand regional economic change in our time. The problem with the restricted view of regional economies – treating regional economies as “containers” little influenced of what actually happen around them – worsens with the sort of intense economic globalization that has developed since the 1980s.

One reason for the rather restricted view of regional economies and how they develop is that evolutionary economic geography (and other “container-inclined” regional approaches) did not come up with the language to consider how relations between regions change across time and with globalization, and why and how this affects the core processes of the evolutionary dynamics of regional economies. In Chapter 9, we merged the evolutionary perspective with time geography, opening up to a world of decreasing time geography constraints, which becomes important to processes of economic change in regions. Globalization has turned regional economies into something they were not before. Economic actors operate in a world characterized by deep globalization (Dicken 2015).

At the core of globalization – as one of its indicators – are the vastly increased volumes and values of global trade in manufactured goods, and lately also in services. Between 1950 and 1999, global production volumes in merchandise increased sevenfold, but export volumes increased twentyfold and export values increased over eightyfold (based on data from World Trade Organization (WTO) n.d.a.; n.d.b.).