The development of new industries demands access to local capabilities. Little attention has yet been paid to the role of spillovers from neighbor regions for industrial diversification, nor has the role of network linkages between neighbor regions been investigated. As the spread of...

This note studies the mechanisms through which regional economies diversify over time and formulates suggestions on how policy can influence such process. In particular, two closely related concepts will be defined, that is, technological relatedness and related variety. Regional diversification...

Within the smart specialisation programme, the European Commission urges regional policy-makers to assess their regional innovation potential and consider investing in the areas of eco-technologies taking into account the regions’ specific strengths and weaknesses. In evolutionary economic...

How do regions diversify over time? Inspired by recent studies, we argue that regions diversify into industries that make use of capabilities in which regions are specialized. As the spread of capabilities occurs through mechanisms that have a strong regional bias, we expect that capabilities...

Following last decadeÕs programmatic papers on Evolutionary Economic Geography, we report on recent empirical advances and how this empirical work can be positioned vis-ˆ-vis other strands of research in economic geography. First, we review studies on the path dependent nature of clustering,...

The evolutionary turn in economic geography has proposed that regional diversification is a path-dependent process whereby new industries grow out of preexisting industrial structures through technologically related localized knowledge spillover. This paper examines if this also applies for...

This paper investigates whether related variety, among other types of spatial externalities, affected regional growth in Spain at the NUTS 3 level during the period 1995-2007. We found evidence that related variety matters for growth across regions, especially when measured with the assistance...

The relatedness between the technologies used among firms in a region is thought to affect the nature and scope of knowledge spillovers. In this paper, we set out how the concepts of technological relatedness and related variety have enriched recent literature in economic geography. First,...