Book Review
Applied Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography
Koen Frenken
ISBN: 978-1-84542-845-7 2007 352 pages Edward Elgar
Wenyue Zhuang
NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore
The Applied Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography is a collection of twelve recent studies by a group of excellent scholars from various backgrounds, all of whom are interested in interpreting the phenomena of economic geography through the evolutionary economics lens. The editor's brief survey of the field in the introductory chapter helps the reader quickly understand how evolutionary economic geography differs from both the institutional economic geography and 'new' economic geography, as an approach to studying economic geography, in that it views the economy as an evolutionary process that unfolds in space and time. The evolutionary economics approach takes into account the role of both economic agents and institutions, but in a co-evolutionary perspective.
The twelve different studies cover a broad range of topics that have attracted many research scholars' attention in the field of economic geography, such as the location choice of new firms, the emergence of industry agglomeration, and knowledge spillovers through a network. In spite of the diversity of topics covered in this book, the basic question addressed is clear: how to explain the uneven distribution of economic activities in space and the historical processes that have produced these patterns. Through these insightful and heuristics studies, this book conveys the central theme of applying the evolutionary economics approach to explain economic geography phenomena.
The reader will find it comfortable to follow the material presented and flow of ideas in this book because of its well organized four-layer structure from micro (entrepreneurship) to meso (industry and network) level, and then aggregations of meso-level systems into macro-level spatial systems. For each level, there are 2-3 well-chosen studies from different angles. This makes the whole process of reading full of fun. For example, the entrepreneurship part presents two cases, one of Cambridge, UK and the other of Sophia-Antipolis near Nice, both of which have successfully fostered high-tech entrepreneurship in ICT. While the Cambridge cluster was more endogenously driven, the Sophia-Antipolis cluster was almost triggered by exogenous factors at the beginning. These two cases quickly convince the reader that the evolutionary economic process is complex, and that insights into firms' location decisions can be obtained by analyzing the co-evolution of different factors including prices, institutions as well as agglomeration effects, eg spillovers and path dependence. Another example is the two studies in part II which focus on the industrial dynamics. Steven Klepper's study reviews the evolution of the market and geographic structure of the television receiver, automobile and tire industries, all of which had many producers initially and experienced sharp shakeouts before evolving to agglomerate around a single city. His study shows the importance of organizational heredity and birth in shaping industry agglomeration. Brandon Lee and Wesley Sine's study also focuses on the geographic distribution a new industry - the US electrical power industry from 1978 to 1992. They investigated how the change of US federal legislation on using renewable energy technologies (RETs) before and after 1978 influenced the entrepreneurial opportunity across US states. Different from Steven Klepper, their results emphasize the importance of social movements, regional difference in regulation and the dynamics of regulation in the process of industry evolution.
Another strength of this book is the selection of studies with different research methodologies including case-study, surveys, econometrics, theoretical modeling, and policy evaluation. The historical nature of evolutionary analysis poses challenges for quantitative study. Although the collection of time-series data and econometric model selection are still demanding, several heuristic studies in this book have successfully adopted econometric techniques to analyze evolutionary process, which encourages future explorations. Through selecting studies with different methodologies, it also enables this book to reach its goal: to advance empirical methodologies of evolutionary economics in the economic geography.
Additionally, what makes this book a success is the possibilities of future research suggested by these well-chosen studies in this book. Although plenty of research has been done in this field, this book enlarges the reader's view and shows potential areas requiring further efforts.
If there is one weakness of the book, it is that for non-academic readers, it may be difficult to understand some of the concepts presented. Also for those without strong econometric training, some studies dealing with advanced econometric models may be too advanced for them. Such as the stochastic frontier approach used in Chapter 6 and the quadratic assignment procedure adopted in chapter 9. This feature of this book to some extent limits its readership to a rather narrow group of people - those research scholars who are already somewhat familiar with the literature. As a PhD student who is interested in this field and has already had some knowledge in this area, I found this book rather interesting and helpful for my research. However, it may not be suited for undergraduate students, MBA students or managers.
Finally, for those who are seeking to grasp the evolutionary theories, this book may not be the best choice since it is more on the application of the evolutionary economics rather than theory building. I would like to recommend this book to anyone working on economic geography, whatever their particular theoretical focus, and particularly to those interested in applying the evolutionary economics approach to geography research.
eContent Home
