Moving beyond Anglo-American economic geography: the significance of non-Anglo-American model

ABSTRACT

This commentary extends the debate, proposed by Professor Robert Hassink and his colleagues, on how studies in the non-Anglo-American context can contribute to current debates in economic geography. By examining some ongoing debates based on China, we agree with Hassink’s view and hopes to point out how Anglo-American economic geography can benefit from critical engagements with China as well as other important and yet overlooked regions, such as Africa, East Europe, South Asia and South America. We stress that the rapidly changing economic geographies in these regions may serve as one of the key sites to reproduce our discipline of economic geography, or to ‘theorize back’ at mainstream, Anglo-American theories of economic-geographic dynamics in specific locales.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglo-American economic geography
• global value chain
• global production network
• evolutionary economic geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41425001, 41701115, and 41731278].