We develop and calibrate a quantitative spatial equilibrium model of Indonesia to analyze the potential impact of the Trans-Sumatra Toll Road project on the country's economy. The estimated aggregate welfare gains vary from 0.25% of the country's output if there is only trade in final goods to 1.37% if sectoral linkages and trade in intermediates are allowed, and they further increase to 3.54% if labor mobility is considered. About 39% of gains result from improved product market integration and 61% from easier worker migration. Finally, the welfare effect concentrates on Sumatra, whereas the overall national inequality declines.
We analyze jurisdictional fragmentation and sprawl utilizing municipal mergers as a quasi-experiment. We use Finnish population-wide register data with precise location information and compare the location of new buildings (and their residents) in the actual mergers to the location of new buildings in a control group of hypothetical mergers constructed from the pre-merger municipality map. We find that, in the smaller municipalities of a given merger new buildings were built about 10 per cent or 2 km closer to the new administrative center. These effects materialize after two municipal council terms (8 years) and are driven by mergers resembling functional urban areas.
This article brings new, compelling regional-level evidence on the environmental degradation brought about by intra-European value chains. It postulates the presence of pollution havens as a consequence of European production integration. We identify a clear elites-ghettos divide in carbon emission intensity per unit of production across the European Union regions: While capital-cities and Northern regions form a carbon elite club of contained emissions, Eastern regions converge towards systematically higher intensities. Our results derive from a novel construction of the intra-European emission network at the subnational level for the period 2008-2018. The uneven geography of carbon emissions is the direct consequence of distinct specialization profiles enhanced by European GVCs, with mid-stream manufacturing regions structurally locked into higher emission intensity, which serve as pollution havens for the European carbon elites.
In an era of polycrisis, lead firms play a pivotal role in maintaining productivity and stability across global production networks (GPNs). This study examines the resilience strategies employed in response to external uncertainties and disruptions that constitute the polycrisis. Our conceptual framework integrates GPN and operations management perspectives, capturing both internal and external drivers of strategic decision-making. Empirically, we apply a survey of Danish manufacturing firms to identify the nature of these strategic choices. Most firms are affected by the polycrisis and take precautions through expanding business intelligence and early warning systems. Findings reveal a preference for cautious strategies involving modest changes, such as buffer and scanning, over more radical and costly options, like redundancy and supplier flexibility, which involve changes to the firm's global configuration. This research offers empirical insights into firm-level strategizing and implications for GPN governance.
For economic geographers, innovation provides explanations for success in regional development and enhanced understanding of processes of spatial concentration. Since the founding of the Journal of Economic Geography in 2001, shifts can be observed in economic geographic debates. Semantically, the term "innovation" has broadened and become more normative. As for the actors involved, a more diverse and inclusive understanding of entrepreneurship has emerged. And in terms of spatial concepts, a trend toward dynamic, multi- and translocal innovation spaces can be observed. I reflect upon how articles published in JOEG have advanced these debates and discuss omissions and future directions.
This article examines how subnational institutions mediate global value chain (GVC) governance and shape regional upgrading trajectories. Focusing on the medical device cluster in Baja California, Mexico, it develops a cluster-GVC framework that conceptualizes "subnational co-governance" as a mediating layer between vertical lead-firm control and horizontal coordination. Using qualitative fieldwork and comparative analysis with Ireland and Costa Rica, the study shows upgrading is co-produced through firm strategies and policy frameworks rather than driven by firms alone. Subnational policy capabilities widen upgrading space and enhance resilience but operate within global asymmetries, refining GVC theory by embedding governance in multi-scalar institutional architectures.
Crowdfunding (CF) has emerged as a novel source of entrepreneurial finance, yet its role in shaping regional industrial dynamics remains poorly understood. Adopting an evolutionary economic geography perspective and exploiting a newly developed database, this article examines the relationship between CF activity and the emergence of new local industrial specializations. The analysis shows that industries receiving funds through CF are more likely to become part of local specialization patterns, especially when they are related to the existing industrial structure. Moreover, these associations are stronger in counties characterized by higher levels of credit insecurity.
This commentary outlines an agenda for critical economic geography research to investigate the motivations, outcomes and geographies of university mergers. Drawing from examples around the world, and focusing on the UK higher education system as a pertinent example, we explore inter-university (between institutions) and intra-university mergers (within institutions), demonstrating their potential to reshape institutions, academic disciplines and local communities in powerful ways. Remaining sensitive to geographical context while conceptualizing universities as anchor institutions, we outline the inherent contradictions of university mergers, arguing that economic geographers are uniquely positioned to investigate this phenomenon.
This article analyzes the causal impact of school closures on electoral outcomes in France between 1995 and 2022. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that the closure of the only school in a given municipality leads to an increase in 0.527 percentage points in votes for the populist far right and 0.968 percentage points for the left in presidential elections. Voters prefer the populist far right when their pre-existing levels of trust in mainstream parties are low. The identified electoral effects are absent in municipalities with multiple schools, suggesting that citizens are particularly concerned with the lack of access to public education.
Economic geography has increasingly engaged with environmental change, yet ecological limits are rarely treated as binding constraints on regional development. This article argues that planetary boundaries remain underexplored in economic geography and reframes them as spatially differentiated constraints that define region-specific ecological feasibility. This perspective shows how non-linear limits, uneven exposure, and burden shifting reshape development trajectories, challenge assumptions of convergence, and generate new forms of regional inequality and spatial conflict. It also outlines an agenda for research on feasibility and governance in the Anthropocene.
This article combines insights from relational thinking, economic geography, and economic sociology to provide a powerful lens for understanding contemporary property markets and the rising influence of asset managers in them. Moving beyond cultural, institutional, and cognitive aspects often portrayed by urban studies, it shows how asset managers' power in dictating property market dynamics is affected by their structural embeddedness and brokerage strategies. We employ an iterative approach that articulates network mapping with qualitative case studies to illuminate the structural-relational configuration of the market and its evolving dynamics, flagging potential market reconfigurations that can affect Brazil's property market
For the first time in over two decades, semiconductor firms have significantly increased their manufacturing investments in Germany between 2021 and 2023. We argue three interconnecting factors have influenced these firm strategies in what we call the 'post-2020 context': heightened risks of supply chain disruptions, geopolitical trade tension, and state subsidies. Conceptually, we integrate these factors into the global production network 2.0 framework by discussing how risks and the de-risking state interact with the market imperative and cost-capability ratio dynamics to influence firm strategies. Drawing on interviews with semiconductor firms, we discuss the interaction between positive market dynamics for automotive semiconductors, customer concerns for supply chain resilience related to environmental risk, the effect of heightened geopolitical risk mainly concerning China, and European Union subsidy schemes which reduced Germany's cost disadvantage. We show how these varied interactions drove unprecedented semiconductor investment in Germany.
Firms in industry clusters benefit from locating close to suppliers and customers. However, the pervasiveness of global value chains questions the need for co-location in buyer-supplier relationships. We propose that supply-chain partners are more likely to co-locate if they exchange not only goods but also know-how, implying superadditivity of Marshallian agglomeration channels. We test this in a coagglomeration framework using microdata for Hungary-a small, open economy deeply embedded in global value chains-examining co-location, labor flows, and value chains between firms and industries. We find that supply chains foster co-location primarily among firms in skill-related industries.
This article shows that the spatial dispersion of high-income earners across French regions follows an inverted U-shape between 1960 and 2019. Dispersion declined from the early 1960s to around 2000, driven by strong regional convergence in employment structures: the fastest deindustrialization occurred in manufacturing-intensive regions, while laggard regions expanded both manufacturing and services. Since the early 2000s, dispersion has risen again as convergence in services stopped and high-skilled services increasingly clustered in large urban areas. High earners were initially over-represented in major cities and the industrial Northeast; today in major cities and Swiss-border regions.
This article investigates whether a nonlinear relationship exists between outward foreign direct investments (OFDIs) from Chinese city-regions and home-region income, related to regional spillovers from access to foreign knowledge and markets. Using quadratic panel regressions from 2003 through 2016, we identify a U-shaped relationship between OFDIs and home-region income. When OFDI activity is low, OFDIs are negatively associated with home-region income due to limited absorptive capacity at an early development stage, but as investment activity intensifies, positive income effects dominate. We find that prior exposure to inward foreign direct investments (IFDIs) moderates this nonlinear relationship between OFDIs and home-region income.
We combine history with economic geography to shed light on the long-run determinants of territorial development differentials in Italy. Specifically, we study the effects of historical sovereignty change on current local economic development. We measure historical sovereignty change as the yearly number of changes of sovereignty that occurred in the period 1000-1861-that is, until the unification of Italy-and assess its effects on labor productivity in 2018. We estimate a negative effect of historical sovereignty change on current local economic development, and identify-both theoretically and empirically-civic capital as a plausible underlying mechanism.
This paper pluralizes the "dark side of innovation" discourse through a fourfold taxonomy: false positives, negative externalities, false negatives, and undone positives. As these dimensions reflect the contested nature of innovations, controversy is framed as an opportunity to (re)direct novelty toward societal welfare. Central to this redirection is an economic geography of controversial innovation, highlighting the tension between exnovating "destructive creation" and enabling the "creative destruction" of alternative futures. Spatial Pockets of Innovation are conceptualized as geographical places of peripheral opportunity, offering the cushioning and institutional slack required to develop, scrutinize, and legitimize contested and unconventional novelty.
This paper examines the impact of Ethiopia's Road Sector Development Program (RSDP) from 1997-2016 on land use and economic activity, using spatial variation in road upgrades and satellite imagery. We use three approaches to triangulate the effect of the RSDP: difference-in-differences examining economic activity near upgraded roads, long-difference instrumental variables comparing areas connected to upgraded versus non-upgraded roads, and market access analysis. For RSDP phases I-III, upgrades increase local economic activity, with effects varying by baseline activity. Areas with medium-to-high baseline activity showed positive effects, while areas with the lowest activity showed minimal effects. Results are weaker for RSDP IV.
This critical commentary celebrates the major intellectual advances and evolution of labour geography over the last 25 years, as showcased through the pages of JEG. It also identifies some persistent blind spots, marginalized actors, and vital future directions through which labour geographers (as future authors, reviewers, and editors of JEG) should continue to push the boundaries of economic geography as a field of study through new and evolving engagements with labour.
