Economic geography
Economic geography is a specialized branch of human geography that explores the spatial dimensions of economic activities and their interactions with the physical world. This field investigates the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, examining how these processes are influenced by various geographical factors. Economic geographers analyze the relationships among technology, socioeconomic distribution, political systems, and available resources to understand economic behavior in different environments.
The discipline encompasses a range of economic activities categorized into sectors: primary (extraction of natural resources), secondary (manufacturing and processing), and tertiary (services), with some theories also considering quaternary and quinary sectors. Research in economic geography often intersects with other geographic subfields, such as urban and transportation geography, and can be approached from multiple perspectives, including historical, theoretical, and critical lenses.
As traditional economic geography addresses the organization of economic structures, it has evolved to integrate contemporary concerns like globalization and technological advancements, leading to the emergence of new economic geography. This adaptation reflects a growing interest in understanding the dynamics of the global economy in today’s interconnected world. Overall, economic geography provides valuable insights into how economic activities are shaped by and, in turn, shape the spaces they inhabit.
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Subject Terms
Economic geography
Economic geography is a branch within the field of human geography. It focuses on understanding the variety of economic activities in which humans engage and the relationship of these activities with the world around them. In other words, it studies the spatial aspects of human economic behavior, such as its connection to the physical environment. Economic geography looks at factors such as production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services in relation to the spaces in which these activities occur.
When using the terms "production" and "distribution," economic geographers usually refer to production as all activities that people engage in to produce goods and to distribution as the way in which wealth and resources flow within a particular spatial environment. Upon analyzing economic processes in relation to their environment, geographers tend to take into account a variety of elements, including technology, socioeconomic distribution, political systems, and available resources.
Overview
Economic geography is a multidisciplinary discipline that draws from the fields of geography, social sciences, and economics. Because virtually any element of economics may be examined from a spatial perspective, economic geography is a highly diverse field of study, with many theories that may overlap or compete. Many researchers cross over with other geography subfields, such as urban geography, social geography, or transportation geography, while others stay closer to traditional economics. Research is typically focused on a specific framework, such as a historical, theoretical, critical, or behavioral perspective.
At its simplest and most traditional, economic geography seeks to organize and understand economic structures in spatial terms. One traditional economic classification identifies the main sectors of economic activity: primary, secondary, and tertiary (sometimes quaternary and quinary sectors are added). Examining these from a geographic perspective provides a basic example of classic economic geography.
Primary sector activities refer to those involved in extracting natural resources and raw material related, in some way, to human subsistence. Geographically, these tend to require large amounts of land and are located in more rural areas; they also involve direct interaction with the natural landscape. Secondary sector activities refer to those that add value to raw material or original resources, such as textile and food processing, and more sophisticated forms of primary sector activities, such as industrial fishing. They are often located between rural and urban areas, as they often require both adequate space (such as a large factory) and plentiful labor. Activities in the tertiary and higher sectors are services, ranging from basic needs such as transportation and sanitation to highly specialized fields such as education and executive management. These activities tend to be clustered in urban environments with a supply of skilled labor and a population requiring such services.
Beyond studying how and why these economic sectors arise in different locations, economic geographers examine things like the flow of resources between sectors, how factors such as political and cultural boundaries affect economic structures, and how economies influence people’s perceptions of spaces. Traditional economic geography, with its emphasis on location and production, has been challenged and expanded by various other views, including theories of globalization, Marxist economics, and the impact of technologies such as the Internet. These influences have led to the development of what is known as new economic geography, which focuses on concerns relating to the changing global economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Bibliography
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Coe, Neil M., Philip F. Kelly, and Henry Wai-Chung Yeung. Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 2013. Print.
Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. 7th ed. New York: Guilford, 2015. Print.
Khanna, Parag. Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. New York: Random House, 2016. Print.
Leyshon, Andrew, et al. The SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011. Print.
Lohr, Steve. "How A.I. Could Reshape the Economic Geography of America." The New York Times, 26 Dec. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/technology/ai-economy-workers.html. Accessed 30 Dec. 2024.
Meehan, Katie, and Kendra Strauss. Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2015. Print.
Moretti, Enrico. The New Geography of Jobs. Boston: Mariner, 2013. Print.
Rubenstein, James. Contemporary Human Geography. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2015. Print.