Economic geographers have recently been confronted with attempts to constitute a new paradigm of evolutionary economic geography. The paper aims at advancing theoretical economic geography by reviewing its core critique and proposed solutions, particularly that of integrating the perspective of...

Explanations of spatial clustering based on localization externalities are being questioned by recent empirical evidence showing that firms in clusters do not outperform firms outside clusters. We propose that these findings may be driven by the particularities of the industrial settings chosen...

One of the key benefits of cities is that they allow the exchange of knowledge and information between economic actors. This may have two effects: it may create the conditions for entirely new innovations to emerge, and it may allow firms to learn innovations from those nearby. Yet few studies...

Local economic development (LED) strategies are increasingly being recommended as an alternative or a complement to traditional development strategies. However, beyond a limited number of areas where ‘best practices’ have been identified, there has been little systematic monitoring of...

The mechanisms driving regional clustering are examined by exploring two theories: agglomeration economies and organizational reproduction. While organizational reproduction through spinoffs dominates clusters' early stages of growth, in clusters populated by small, vertically disintegrated...

It has been argued that the relationship between knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) and multi-national enterprises (MNEs) within the regional economy is advantageous for urban and regional dynamics. It is likely that KIBS aim to locate proximate to (internationally operating) MNEs...

The paper develops an evolutionary framework of regional resilience with a primary focus on the structural properties of local knowledge networks. After a presentation of the network-based rationales of growth and structuring of clusters, we analyze under which structural conditions a regional...

This paper investigates the impact of related variety on regional employment growth in Finland between 1993 and 2006 by means of a dynamic panel regression model. We find that related variety in general has no impact on growth. Instead, after separating related variety among low-and-medium tech...

The economic geography literature assumes that large leading firms (technology gatekeepers)(TGs) with high absorptive capacity and high-intensity R&D expenditures, shape the district learning process. However, there is an absence in the literature of a dynamic analysis of the role of the TG....

We suggest three theoretical propositions on the nature, channels and boundaries of knowledge spillovers, and we test them with knowledge production functions estimated on French NUTS 3 regions over 2002–2008. Several novelties are introduced. First, we quantify external R&D to complement the...