Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The author reflects upon regional economic change and the ways in which this is conceptualised and understood, drawing heavily but not exclusively on some thirty years of research on economy, politics and society in the North East of England. The principal question that this paper addresses is: how are the long periods of continuity, punctuated by occasional major shifts in developmental trajectory and the region's place in the global economy, to be understood? The author seeks to answer this question by exploring the extent to which continuity and change in the region's developmental trajectory can be understood in terms of evolutionary and institutional concepts and the varying engagement of the state with issues of socioeconomic development and change. The value of theoretical plurality in seeking to understand uneven development in capitalism is demonstrated and the limits to public policies that seek to address regional problems indicated.

Agglomeration offers both static, cost-based advantages and dynamic, innovation-related benefits to participating firms. These ideas have informed regional development policy from the growth poles/centres of the 1950/1960s to the contemporary focus on clusters. Although such policies imply the theoretical prospect of regional diversification by exploiting supply-chain and information-based/knowledge-based relationships, in practice they tend to promote regional specialisation. The experiences of many old industrial areas emphasise the risks of specialisation as advantages mutate into liabilities (territorial lock-in). These experiences are ignored in much of the clusters discourse which often lacks historical perspective. This paper provides such perspective by reflecting upon the relationships between the dynamics of industry evolution, agglomeration, and regional development policy with reference to the chemical industry on Teesside in North East England.

Among the variety of old industrial areas, districts involved in the production of light consumer goods are a special case. Taking the single still-surviving footwear-production district in Germany as an example, the author makes an attempt to reflect on the long-term decline of an industrial district and the resulting path dependency of regional development. An evolutionary approach is taken which starts from different institutional bases and reveals a complex mix of temporalities and spatialities in the development path of enterprises and the region. The major empirical findings contrast two dominant types of strategic response to decline: firms either stayed in the industry, but left the region; or stayed in the region, but left the industry. The author concludes by mapping implications for territorial development.

Over time we can observe a dramatic global shift in shipbuilding activities, from Great Britain to Continental Europe to Japan to South Korea; most recently China is gaining ground. Every transition is accompanied by institutional and political reactions, leading to protectionism and trade conflicts. The most recent of these battles is being fought out between the European Commission, in particular Germany as a major player in this market, and South Korea, which is accused of illegally supporting its shipyards. As state support has traditionally played an important role, both in establishing and in protecting shipbuilding as a strategic industry within a national economy, the concept of political lock-in appears to provide a promising method for explaining both the rise, through its enabling element, and delayed fall, through its constraining element, of these specific regional economies. Against the background of this theoretical concept, an empirical study comparing two competing shipbuilding regions—Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany and Gyeongnam in South Korea—was conducted; the results are twofold. First, restructuring the shipbuilding industry in these two regions seems less affected by local and regional factors than it is by national and international organisations. National and international organisations are, under globalisation conditions, increasingly responsible for regulating the conditions of competition, but are failing to do so. Second, because of the multiscale involvement of political and economic actors and, hence, the increasing complexity of the restructuring process, the concept of political lock-in needs to be integrated into a much broader explanatory framework—which the authors develop.

The authors aim to contribute to understanding of the industrial dynamics/evolution of mature export production complexes in the first generation Asian newly industrialised countries (NICs), employing an evolutionary economic perspective. Over the past decade and longer, the first-generation Asian NICs, Singapore included, have been confronted with imperatives necessitating deep restructuring. We observe that the pattern of industrial decline associated with failed restructuring caused by lock-in does not fit these countries, industrial regions, and early industries. Yet research has hardly begun to look at adjustment or to address deeper evolution from tenets in the framework of evolutionary economics, although such an approach is made more rather than less relevant by continued resilience. We analyse the pathway(s) of one early industry, the apparel industry in Singapore, through the 1980s and 90s. The withering away in the Singapore context of an industry such as apparel manufacture is not inevitable. From a juxtaposition of the line of thinking in evolutionary economics in which hindrance and decline due to path dependency and lock-ins are emphasised, with an alternative line in which the possibility of adjusting through renewal and the limited operation of lock-ins is emphasised, we discuss why the latter rather than the former has been the case.

Geographers have a keen interest in innovation because of its connection to regional economic advantage. We argue that, to date, understandings of innovation are predominantly technological and product driven and defined in universal terms such that the nature of innovation is stripped of its contextual influence and is overly masculinist. Through combined analysis of interview material from two complementary studies on the gendering of entrepreneurship based in the United States, this paper challenges current conceptualisations of innovation within geography. We show how the context, both social and geographical, of an innovation is elementary to its identification as innovative. Moreover, we reveal some of the many instances of innovation that occur in economic sectors and by agents that are typically ignored or undervalued by current research and by policy. Our analysis challenges researchers and policymakers to expand their concepts of regional and urban development beyond those processes associated with technologically defined and growth-oriented originality, such that notions of local development may enhance the social well-being of places and be more gender inclusive.

Studies of economic transformation under socialism in general, and the growth and development of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in particular, have been based on the assumption that SOEs are a homogeneous entity. With few exceptions, the extant literature tends to compare SOEs as a whole with other economic sectors. Little has been written about the heterogeneous nature of SOEs. The author examines the internal variation of SOEs at different administrative levels in terms of productivity and profitability in China, which remains one of the largest socialist economies undergoing profound structural changes. The performance of SOEs is found to have varied significantly among the administrative hierarchy of the socialist political system. The changing politics of scale from promoting regional self-reliance in the Maoist era toward both expanding SOE autonomy and fiscal decentralization in the post-Maoist era, has resulted in an increase in the disparity between the SOEs affiliated with the national government and those affiliated with local governments. The investigation of SOEs in the Chinese context raises important theoretical questions concerning the growth dynamics of SOEs and suggests the need for a more careful and path-dependent treatment of socialist economies under reform. The growth of SOEs in transitional socialist economies provides an interesting testing ground in which to evaluate the theoretical discourse concerning the politics of scale and the rescaling of politics.

It is often suggested that innovation is one of the most desirable environmental policy aims, in that it promises to solve the conflict between environmental regulation and economic growth. Contrary to what is frequently advocated—that in order to foster innovation through regulation, most of the attention should be put on the regulation-setting process, I argue that a cooperative stance in the implementation of regulations also has a crucial impact, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This argument is assessed looking at innovation effects that both direct regulations (command-and-control) and indirect regulations (negotiated voluntary agreements, called cleaner production agreements) have in this sector. A face-to-face survey questionnaire, with a non-probabilistic matching sampling strategy, was conducted in 322 firms representing four industrial sectors in Chile. The propensity-scores analysis demonstrates that SMEs involved in voluntary agreements innovate significantly more, as expressed through environmental management systems and techniques. In terms of technological innovations, voluntary agreements promoted incremental (rather than radical) multimedia innovations. Nevertheless, they had a significant effect on triggering at least one radical process change in the SMEs engaged in the programme. I conclude by emphasising that a cooperative style in the design and implementation of regulations has a key role to play in environmental capacity building in SMEs, and that this approach can create the appropriate conditions for innovation. However, this potential cannot be fully realised if there are not strong market and regulatory stimuli towards the development of more radical environmental innovations.