Working Group

Globalization, City-Regions, & Economic Development

Conveners: Michael Storper and Allen J. Scott

Our objective in convening this working group is to examine the ways in which globalization interacts (in both more and less economically-advanced countries) with regional sub-national processes of economic growth and development. Our basic point of departure is a claim that powerful pressures toward spatial agglomeration of economic activity are combining with globalization to produce a new type of developmental dynamic. Globalization, we argue, is inducing intensified economic regionalization, and the peculiar regions (city-regions) that are consequently coming into being across the world influence in important ways the manner in which globalization is unfolding.

On the economic front, our working group will deal with the following major tasks:

Industrial organization and location:
Precisely which activities are locating in metropolitan areas, and why is this the case? This involves bringing together economic geography, industrial organization, and the study of technological innovation. How are agglomeration economies being redefined by globalization?

The distribution of economic activities:
Which sectors are becoming spatially concentrated, and which are spreading out as a result of global market integration? Are there significant differences in the agglomeration and specialization tendencies of economies North America, the EU and the Japan-Asia regions, and if so, what are their consequences for economic performance?

Incomes and output:
What is the relationship between location patterns, trade patterns, and overall economic performance of regions and therefore what can we expect about convergence and divergence from this round of globalization?

Enhancement of growth in low-income countries: given the strong propensity for globalization to enhance geographical polarization of growth and incomes, what are the implications for economic policy for less-developed countries? What can local policy makers accomplish? What are the implications for the less-developed regions of the developing countries?

The urbanization processes associated with globalization are causing the number of large city-regions in the world to increase rapidly. These are not the big cities of yesteryear; they are polycentric urban fields encompassing large territories. At least some of the social and institutional foundations of growth appear to depend on regional governance and institutions and not exclusively on national policies. The existing institutional structures of political and economic governance of these regions were developed under very different economic and geographical conditions. There is increasing evidence that they are not well-adapted to the economic and geographical processes underway today. Hence, the problem of governance of these complex economies now also presents itself as one of the major challenges of our age. At the same time, many regions have become more politically independent and entrepreneurial, emerging as political actors on national and international stages. Building on recent work in many disciplines on the social and political construction of economic advantages, our group will examine the possibilities and limits of effective policy-making for regional development and growth. We will pay special attention to comparisons of the developed countries' regional governance experiences, and to the challenges faced by less developed countries in the current context.