Using dynamic panel data methods on UK counties (1841-1971), we investigate long-term employment dynamics in seven distinct local industries. We study how industries benefit from specialised environments (MAR), diverse local economies (Jacobs’) and large local markets (urbanization), and, in...

The development of new industries demands access to local capabilities. Little attention has yet been paid to the role of spillovers from neighbor regions for industrial diversification, nor has the role of network linkages between neighbor regions been investigated. As the spread of...

How do regions diversify over time? Inspired by recent studies, we argue that regions diversify into industries that make use of capabilities in which regions are specialized. As the spread of capabilities occurs through mechanisms that have a strong regional bias, we expect that capabilities...

Economic geographers have recently been confronted with attempts to constitute a new paradigm of evolutionary economic geography. The paper aims at advancing theoretical economic geography by reviewing its core critique and proposed solutions, particularly that of integrating the perspective of...

This paper investigates whether related variety, among other types of spatial externalities, affected regional growth in Spain at the NUTS 3 level during the period 1995-2007. We found evidence that related variety matters for growth across regions, especially when measured with the assistance...

The question of how new regional growth paths emerge has been raised by many leading economic geographers. From an evolutionary perspective, there are strong reasons to believe that regions are most likely to branch into industries that are technologically related to the preexisting industries...

This paper analyzes the emergence of new technology-based sectors at the regional level. We focus on the specific case of nanotechnology as representative of an industry based on a technology still in infancy whose evolution can be reliably traced on the basis of filed patent submissions. We...

The traditional district literature tends to assume that: (1) the competitiveness of firms depends on external sources of knowledge; (2) all firms in a district benefit from knowledge externalities; (3) relying on external knowledge relationships necessarily means these are confined to the...

The paper explains the commonalities and differences between neoclassical, institutional and evolutionary approaches that have been influential in economic geography during the last couple of decades. For all three approaches, we argue that they are in agreement in some respects and in conflict...

In economic theory, one can distinguish between variety as a source of regional knowledge spillovers, called Jacobs externalities, and variety as a portfolio protecting a region from external shocks. We argue that Jacobs externalities are best measured by related variety (within sectors), while...