https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5443-3683
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Abstract
We synthesise the main conceptual discussion around New Economic Geography (NEG). We provide the background in adjacent fields of economics which made the surge of NEG possible. We then assess the state of the art in NEG and track the intellectual evolution of the field, focussing on the intrinsic criticism that it has been subject to throughout its history. This criticism has its roots in different conceptions of geography and history, as well as other methodological differences between economists and geographers. We analyse the evolution of the debate and communication between geographical economists and economic geographers.
Acknowledgements
I am thankful to António Almodovar, three anonymous referees, and the Editor Richard Sturn for useful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Some of the methodological developments in NEG overviewed in this paper could well be considered to fall under the class of QSE. In what follows, although the present paper does not restrict itself to an analysis of NEG in a narrow sense, it is not meant to be an overview of QSE.
2 The distinction between geographical economists and economic geographers proper was first used by Ron Martin (Citation1999).
3 For an involved discussion of contributions on these topics, consult Gaspar (Citation2018, Sec. 4.5.2).
4 Non-pecuniary externalities, such as knowledge externalities and technological spillovers, have also been gaining increasing recognition as potential determinants of the location of economic activities. Gaspar (Citation2018) provides insights on how knowledge flows and linkages could be incorporated in NEG.
5 The term “footloose” is assigned to models where the mobile factor only enters the fixed costs of manufacturing firms and does not affect its marginal costs. Thus, the mobile factor moves freely with firms between regions, i.e., it is “footloose”.
6 However, NEG has yet to account for the fact that transportation costs are themselves endogenous, i.e., there are transport gains from scale economies which further impacts firms’ mark-ups.
7 Recently, several implications of agents’ heterogeneity in NEG have been surveyed by Gaspar (Citation2018).
8 Many of them were already discussed in previous Sections, while some others shall be mentioned in the subsequent parts of this paper as a response to some of the economic geographers’ misconceptions regarding what NEG does and does not.
9 The common geometries used to picture spherical models, such as the earth globe.
10 For instance, space is continuous, homogeneous, isotropic, and without boundaries. An example of a property of euclidean geometry that does not hold in elliptic space is the Pythagorean Theorem. External influences get internalized in the processes that define the spatial frame.
11 One such example is the work of Mossay and Picard (Citation2011) surveyed in Section 2.5 of this paper. For more details on how knowledge linkages, culture and social interactions have played an increasingly significant role in NEG (and economics in general), I refer the reader to Gaspar (Citation2018, Sect. 4.4 and 4.5).
12 Evolutionary dynamics are a class of dynamical systems usually borrowed from evolutionary game theory and are not to be confused with the evolutionary perspective of change, mutation and adaptation proposed by EEG.
13 Notwithstanding, many systems in economics do exhibit chaotic behaviour (see e.g. Zhang, Citation2005).
14 Moreover, economics in general is often viewed by geographers through a narrow lense, who seem to be unaware of how much many economists have departed from the stringent assumptions of its dominant “mainstream paradigm”. This is evident in e.g. Sheppard’s (Citation2011) assessment of economics.