The New Industrial Geography

The New Industrial Geography focuses on the most important industrial-geographical changes that have taken place in Europe and North America over the last twenty years. It brings together some of the leading scholars in the field.
Since the end of the 1970s, the economies of North America and Western Europe have undergone massive industrial-geographical transformations. This book focuses on three of the most important: on the heightened importance of the region as a generator of both technological innovation and economic wealth; on the contingent effects of new local, national and international forms of regulation; and on the emergence of new institutions, and the reworking of old ones. Drawing on the theoretical resources of institutional economics, the book opens new perspectives in economic geography. In its focus on historical and geographical context, institutional embeddedness, and tacit rules and formal regulations, institutional economics is shown to be the perfect basis for understanding the profound economic and geographical changes, and on which also to build a new kind of industrial geography. Issues covered include: the retheorization of the geography of industrial districts; the analysis of institutional "thickness", and the economic-geographical effects of institutional rigidity and sclerosis; the economic-geographical consequences of new regulatory bodies and policies; the geographically situ