BOOK REVIE
Unexpected Outcomes: How Emerging Economies Survived the Global Financial Crisis, edited by Carol Wise, Leslie Elliott Armijo, and Saori N. Katada
Jun Ho Jeong, pages 455-457
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The Geographical Transformation of China, edited by Michael Dunford and Weidong Liu
Neil Reid, pages 458-459
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Dynamics of Economic Spaces in the Global Knowledge-Based Economy: Theory and East Asian Cases, by Sam Ock Park
Beth A. Bee, pages 460-461
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Global Clusters of Innovation – Entrepreneurial Engines of Economic Growth around the World, edited by Jerome Engel
Charlie Karlsson, pages 462-463
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ABSTRACTS
Universities, Public Research, and Evolutionary Economic Geography
Paul Vallance
Abstract: Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) has, thus far, neglected the contribution of universities to innovation processes in its emerging theoretical explanations of territorial economic change. This article begins to address this conceptual gap by outlining a perspective on the ways in which universities, as organizations with institutional features and functions that are distinctive to those of firms, can enhance the adaptive capacity of national or regional economies. The argument developed is based on a complexity theory view of system self-transformation and supports greater attention to this framework in a pluralistic EEG.
Key words: universities, evolutionary economic, geography, complex adaptive systems, regional adaptive capacity
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The Importance of Housing for Self-Employment
Darja Reuschke
Abstract: This article demonstrates that housing influences decisions to start businesses or become self-employed. Housing characteristics can facilitate or hinder business start-ups, and the mechanisms depend on whether the business start-up takes place in people’s homes or not. Hitherto, economic geography has largely viewed housing as a system that accommodates and filters the workforce across space and neglected that housing is an economic resource to individuals. Using longitudinal microdata for the United Kingdom and a sample that accounts for the endogeneity of housing to employment/entrepreneurship, the study finds that home-based self-employment is facilitated by housing wealth, outright ownership, detached houses, and large dwellings and is undermined by living in flats. Private rented accommodation enables entries into self-employment that are not based in people’s homes. Housing thus provides financial security and space, on the one hand, and shapes flexibility needed for entrepreneurship, on the other hand. Areas for future research arising from this study relate to the role of housing over the individual entrepreneur’s life course and area effects on entrepreneurship and self-employment that relate to the spatial variation of housing supply.
Key words: self-employment, home-based businesses, housing, endogeneity, entrepreneurship, homes, housing equity
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Economic Institutions and the Location Strategies of European Multinationals in Their Geographic Neighborhood
Andrea Ascani, Riccardo Crescenzi, and Simona Iammarino
Abstract: This article investigates how the location behavior of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is shaped by the economic institutions of the host countries. The analysis covers a wide set of geographically proximate economies with different degrees of integration with the old fifteen European Union members: new member states, accession and candidate countries, as well as European Neighborhood Policy countries and the Russian Federation. The article aims to shed new light on the heterogeneity of MNE preferences for the host countries’ regulatory settings (including labor market and business regulation), legal aspects (i.e., protection of property rights and contract enforcement), and the weight of the government in the economy. By employing data on 6888 greenfield investment projects, the random-coefficient mixed logit analysis shows that, although the quality of the national institutional framework is generally beneficial for the attraction of foreign investment, MNEs’ preferences over economic institutions are highly heterogeneous across sectors and business functions.
Key words: multinational enterprises, economic institutions, location choice, European Union
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Resource-sensitive Global Production Networks: Reconfigured Geographies of Timber and Acoustic Guitar Manufacturing
Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren
Abstract: This article examines how resource materiality, scarcity, and evolving international environmental regulation shape global production networks (GPNs). Nature-facing elements, including resource scarcity and environmental regulation, have seldom featured in GPN analysis. So, too, GPN analysis emphasizes spatial relations between network actors over temporal change. We extend GPN theorization through a temporal analysis of industrial change, connecting manufacturing to upstream resource materialities and shifting regulation, and to downstream consumers increasingly concerned with provenance and material stewardship. To illustrate, we document a resource-sensitive GPN—acoustic guitar manufacturing—where scarcity of select raw materials (tonewoods) with material qualities of resonance, strength, and beauty, as well as tighter regulation, has spawned shifting economic geographies of new actors who influence the whole GPN. Such actors include specialist extraction firms, salvagers, traders, verification consultants, and customs agents who innovate in procurement and raw material supply risk management. Traditional large guitar manufacturing firms have struggled with regulation and securing consistent resource supply, although smaller lead manufacturing firms have creatively responded via novel procurement methods and marketing, developing closely bound, iterative relationships with specialist timber harvesters, traders, and with emotionally attached consumers. A cohort of tonewood supply firms and guitar manufacturers—especially in Australia, the Pacific Northwest and Canada, key locations of both resource and design expertise—have together altered material stewardship practices and commodity production. Niche strategies derive exchange value from rarity and resource innovation, embracing raw material variability, inconsistent supply, and the need for alternatives. How firms adapt to resource supply security risks, we argue, is an imperative question for GPN analysis.
Key words: resource geographies, global production networks, environmental protection, timber, materiality, stewardship, expertise, innovation, sustainability, supply chains
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