Contract service firms in local authorities: evolving geographies of activity, Reg. Studies 33 , 121-130. The introduction of compulsory competitive tendering has significantly reshaped the nature of manual service provision in local authorities. Since 1989, private firms have won an increasing...

Over the past 25 years, the USA has pioneered a new technological revolution, based on large numbers of new small enterprises, financed by a dynamic venture (risk) capital market. The European Union, meanwhile, has lagged behind in this sector of economic activity, and compared to the US...

Although there is a growing body of research into the cultural and creative industries, little work has focused specifically upon on the geography of design and its role in regional economies. The relative neglect of the geography of the UK design industry is surprising given recent assertions...

Monetary valuation of climate-change impacts, and the cost-benefit analysis of climate-change policy into which it feeds, has long been controversial. Writers in ecological economics have done much to illuminate its difficulties. For the purposes of this paper, the key difficulties of the...

The ‘new retail geography’ was a term which emerged in the 1990s to describe a reconstructed and theoretically engaged subdiscipline of retail geography which took both its economic and cultural dimensions seriously, and which argued that the transformation of retail capital and of its...

Since the late 1980s the East European clothing sector has witnessed a dramatic transformation. Driven by increasing costs in Western Europe, Western clothing retailers and buyers have increasingly outsourced production to lower-cost regions of postcommunist Eastern Europe. One consequence of...

The Competition Commission’s analysis in 2007 of entry and exit conditions among small stores across more than one thousand British high streets provided a landmark piece of research on a topic in which debate and policy recommendations had moved significantly, and arguably dangerously, ahead...

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sites of production, has become a key means through which labour in retailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedly in their approaches to ethical trade and that such...

Innovative capacity of firms has traditionally been explained through intra-firm characteristics. In the more recent literature, much emphasis has been put on determinants that are external to the firm. These external factors, called knowledge spillovers, refer to the positive externalities that...

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economicgeography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namelythe Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors(especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and...