Globalization, regional resource uses and time geography

So far, the evolutionary perspective has acquainted us with a rather peculiar version of the world and of economic production, where the most important resources are linked to space (they are localized), and where all uses are derived from resources located in the same region. In theoretical terms, we have created a regionally endogenous model, and one that is actually not too far from the evolutionary “self- reliant” or territorially isolationist models of growth that have been influential in geography and innovation studies over the last 20 years.

For example, we have taken for granted that the car producer in Gothenburg only made use of resources in the region and their regionally derived uses in order to achieve the regional capability of car production. Links to other regions were not needed, neither in production nor in product or process development. So, if our first simplification of how production happens within the car industry was not already a stretch, the assumption that regions are “self- sufficient” in terms of resources and uses to achieve their capabilities is maybe even more so. In fact, we have already concluded that some of the most important forces for economic change in regions originate from outside the region itself. Additionally, there is globalization.

Regional economies are today part of global chains of production and are not isolated production islands (Coe et al. 2004). Intuitively we know this: the transportation of goods, people and information have become faster, cheaper and safer since the second industrial revolution. The telephone and the internet have dramatically changed the way we interact across space. Very few economic activities, from the local garage to transnational corporations, from the local supermarket to the global suppliers of knowledge- intensive services, are left untouched by the global forces of change influencing where economic activities can be located and how firms go about their business.

There are at least two implications of this development for evolutionary economic geography that are far less intuitive. The first is a “regional paradox of globalization”.