We explain employment growth in 40 Dutch regions for the period 1996-2002. Our main interest is to test the effect of sectoral variety using data on five-digit sector employment, while controlling for traditional variables. Our measure of variety is entropy, as this measure allows for...

In the paper, we concentrate on one of the most challenging issues of economic geography, that is, how to explain and analyze the evolution of the spatial pattern of new industries. First, we review the literature concerning this issue. Various theoretical frameworks provide an explanation for...

This paper explains the main 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...

In this paper, the changing roles of agglomeration externalities during different stages of the industry life cycle are investigated. A central argument is that agglomeration externalities vary with mode of competition, innovation intensity, and characteristics of learning opportunities in...

In this paper, we concentrate on how evolutionary economics contributes to a better understanding of the spatial evolution of newly emerging industries. Inspired by evolutionary thinking, four types of explanations are discussed and tested in an empirical analysis of the spatial pattern of the...

The principal objective of this paper is to formulate some possible links between evolutionary economics and regional policy, a topic that has not (yet) been covered by the literature. We firstly give a brief overview of some issues of regional policy, conceived as a strategy to influence the...

We study localization, urbanization, and Jacobs’ externality effects on plant survival in Sweden (1970-2004). We focus on two questions: (1) do agglomeration externalities change with the age of plants? (2) using new information about the relatedness among industries, what is the role of...

This paper analyzes the process of industrial diversification in the EU-27 and ENP countries in the period 1995-2010 by means of world trade data derived from the BACI database (elaborated UN Comtrade data). Our results show that in both the EU-27 and the ENP countries, the evolution of the...