Contesting Europe: representations of space in English school geography

The development of national education systems was premised on the assumption that they would offer particular representations of the ‘national space’, and school subjects such as geography and history offered pupils specific accounts of space and time. The project of European integration suggests the need for school curricula to offer alternative ways of imagining space. This essay examines the representation of European space in school geography textbooks. The analysis suggests that the texts contain different versions of the ‘politics of space’ and that there is a need for a critically-reflexive stance on the ‘geographies of Europe’ as taught in schools

Introducing the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator of political violence

Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to cluster together and spread geographically. However, the geography of most conflicts remains under-studied. To fill this gap, this article presents a new indicator that measures two key geographical properties of subnational political violence: the conflict intensity within a region on the one hand, and the spatial distribution of conflict within a region on the other. We demonstrate the indicator in North and West Africa between 1997 to 2019 to show that it can clarify how conflicts can spread from place to place and how the geography of conflict changes over time

Economic Geography within and between European Nations: The Role of Market Potential and Density across Space and Time

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We estimate simple versions of these two views on economic geography and also establish if the relevance of spatial linkages varies across aggregation levels or time. For our sample of 14 European countries and 213 corresponding regions, we find that spatial linkages are more important at the country level and that its relevance varies across time.

Bringing History into Evolutionary Economic Geography for a Better Understanding of Evolution

The paper tries to construct the historical methodology for evolutionary economic geography. I elevate history to the methodological foundation of evolutionary economic geography, on which concrete research methods should be based. I explore how to evolution in economic geography by placing history in historical time and historical contexts. Accordingly, the concepts of path creation and path dependence should be used together in historical study. More important, the concept of path interdependence, which stresses the importance of the circumstances under which different processes and events are likely to occur, opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the world.Organizational ecology, fashion industry, creative industries, clusters, institutional lock-in

Look-up Tables to Link 1991 Population Statistics to the 1998 Local Government Areas

Between 1995 and 1998 the local authority structure and geography of the United Kingdom was substantially revised. The two-tier system of local government was abolished in Wales, Scotland, and in parts of non-metropolitan England, and replaced with a single-tier system. This involved the creation of a new set of local authority area boundaries which in many places cut across those of the old districts. In addition, many of the local authorities unaffected by the reorganisation nonetheless had experienced small - though demographically significant - boundary changes since the last census. By the time the final phase of the reorganisation came into effect on 1st April 1998 the local government map of the United Kingdom was very different from that of April 1991. There is a need therefore to provide demographic and other geographically based data for the new geography for years prior to 1998. This paper aims to fill a part of this requirement by focusing on two important issues. First, it describes a look-up table detailing exactly how the 1998 local government geography relates to 1991 Census areas, and second, it sets out methods for producing 1991 Census data and mid-1991 population estimates (including single year age detail) for the new geography. A selection of the results produced by the described methods is included in tables and population pyramids

Divergence – Is it Geography?

This paper tests directly a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan during di®erent time periods. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log- linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold regression technique in econometrics. In particular, we test whether regions with high population density (centers) grow faster and have a permanently higher per capita income than regions with low population density (peripheries). We find geography driven divergence for US states and European regions after 1980. Population density is superior in explaining divergence to initial income which the most important o±cial EU eligibility criterium for regional aid is built on. Divergence is stronger on smaller regional units (NUTS3) than on larger ones (NUTS2). Thus, the wavelength of agglomeration forces seems to be rather small in Europe. Human capital and R&D are transmission channels of divergence processes. Human capital based poverty trap models are an alternative explanation for regional poverty traps.Keywords: threshold estimation, economic geography, regional income convergence, poverty trap, regime shifts, bootstrap

Economic Development and Technology Diffusion

I first present a New Economic Geography model and analyze the impact of R&D on economic development of integrating countries. I find that technology diffusion and skilled labor migration stimulates economic development through fix cost reduction on a firm level. As the inclusion of foreign technology matters for structurally backward countries, I second use time series data for Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland representing European integration during the 1980s and 1990s. In considering three different technology diffusion channels, estimates, however, reduces to Portugal as test procedures confirm nonstationarity and cointegration only for this country. I find empirical evidence for bilateral trade as a diffusion channel but not for FDI or foreign patents.Economic Geography, Agglomeration, Technology Diffusion, Nonstationary Time Series

The Aims and Scope of Evolutionary Economic Geography

This aim of this paper is to present the objectives and scope of an evolutionary approach to economic geography. We argue that the goal is not only to utilise the concepts and ideas from evolutionary economics (and evolutionary thinking more broadly) to help interpret and explain how the economic landscape changes over historical time, but also to reveal how situating the economy in space adds to our understanding of the processes that drive economic evolution, that is to say, to demonstrate how geography matters in determining the nature and trajectory of evolution of the economic system. We will argue that evolutionary economic geography is concerned with the spatialities of economic novelty; with how the spatial structures of the economy emerge from the micro-behaviours of economic agents; with how, in the absence of central coordination or direction, the economic landscape exhibits self-organisation; and with how the processes of path creation and path dependence interact to shape geographies of economic development and transformation, and why and how such processes may themselves be place dependent. Economic transformation proceeds differently in different places, and the mechanisms involved neither originate nor operate evenly across space. Our concern is both with the ways in which the forces making for economic change, adaptation and novelty shape and reshape the geographies of wealth creation, work and welfare, and with how the spatial structures and features so produced themselves feed back to influence the forces driving economic evolution. In the final part, we summarize a number of papers that have contributed to evolutionary economic geography, and which will be published in The Handbook on Evolutionary Economic Geography that is edited by the two authors, and forthcoming at Edward Elgar.evolutionary economic geography, industry location, geography of networks, institutions, agglomeration economies

An evolutionary model of firms location with technological externalities

In an economic geography model where both a negative pecuniary and a positive technological externality are present, we introduce an explicit dynamics of firms locational choice and we characterize its long run distribution. Our analysis shows that economic activities evenly distribute when the pecuniary externalities prevail, and agglomerate otherwise. Due to the stochastic nature of the dynamics, even when agglomeration occurs, it is only a metastable state. By giving time and firms heterogeneity a role, we are bringing the evolutionary approach inside the domain of economic geography.Evolutionary Economic Geography; Heterogeneity; Agglomeration; Technological externalities; Markov Chains