Recent decades have seen momentous changes in the economic geography of the world. Political transitions and economic liberalization have brought formerly closed countries into the world economy. In Richard Freeman’s phrase, this has amounted to a “doubling of the world labor force.” The collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc brings 260 million workers into the world labor force; the opening ...

Will the Internet redefine the "core" and the "periphery," creating a new geography, with neighborhoods connected not with streams and roads but with wires and microwave transmissions? An analogy to previous transportation and communications improvements is frequently made today: the transportation revolution of the 20th century permitted the deagglomeration of much physical production, and the...

In this paper, we test the Rodrik et al (2004) framework to explain differences in development levels across countries by using a broader set of definitions for institutions, geography and economic variables. We use a multi-faceted database to measure institutions in an attempt to go beyond the single-dimension measures that are often employed. We find that institutions trump other factors (geo...

The Internet is perhaps the defining technology of the emerging twenty-first century. This article examines the infrastructure that comprises the “network of networks” and the spatial patterns that have emerged in the Internet’s short existence. In its brief history, the Internet has manifested a tentative relationship with the urban hierarchy. This relationship is tracked over a four-year peri...

The linkage between economic activity and geography is obvious: Populations cluster mainly on coasts and rarely on ice sheets. Past studies of the relationships between economic activity and geography have been hampered by limited spatial data on economic activity. The present study introduces data on global economic activity, the G-Econ database, which measures economic activity for all large ...

Contemporary debates in economic geography are characterized by a lack of agreement with respect to both those aspects of the evolving economic landscape that call for explanation and what constitutes an adequate explanation of geographical reality. We articulate a distinctively geographical approach to modeling processes of regional growth and change. The evolving economic landscape is concept...

This paper explores the role of geography in economic development and demographic transition. It presents a growth model where survival is endogenously determined and where the odds of survival and the returns to labor are higher in geographically favorable regions. Higher life expectancy prompts parents to devote more of their resources to old-age consumpion and enjoyment. Consequently, they i...

Port geographers and port economists all look basically at the way a port develops and performs. While this may seem rather trivial, the simple fact that 90% of world trade volumes are ensured by maritime transport is in itself a sufficient argument assessing the importance of ports in shaping the world economy. The core intention of port specialists is thus to explain why some ports grow while...

a Department of Finance & Economics, Texas State University, United States b School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, United States c Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria d Centre for Statistics, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom e Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Uni...