What is economic geography and who are economic geographers?
Economic geography is a sub-discipline within human geography concerned with describing and explaining the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services within an explicitly spatial economy.
What are our core study areas? We do not have a single core of economic geography studies. But some of the core study areas that we agree on are uneven development, inequality, globalization, core-periphery relations, environment and sustainbility.
What are our theoretical base and methodology of research design?
After the Second World War, following a more general enthusiasm for things scientific, economic geography’s “space cadets” mounted a “quantitative and theoretical revolution,” transforming the discipline into spatial science (Barnes 2000). Led by graduate students and young professors, the movement was defined by the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, and the importation of rigorous abstract theories and models drawn from at least four different sources. From neo-classical economics came general models of competition and rational choice theory. From physics came gravity, potential and entropy models that, in turn, were used to explain patterns of spatial interaction. From the recouping of a hitherto forgotten nineteenth-century German location school came a series of location models: von Thunen’s theory of agricultural location, Weber’s theory of industrial location, and Lösch’s and Christaller’s central place theory. Finally, from geometry came a slew of axioms, lemmas and theorems that could be used to underpin a set of explanatory spatial morphological laws (Bunge 1962). More generally, economic geographers who prosecuted spatial science believed that an autonomous set of spatial forces, and formalized as laws, regulated the geography of the economy, and were discernible only by applying the scientific method.
What is the importance of our discipline of studies to the human world?
What makes our area of study distictive from the other social science disciplines?Geographers recognize the importance of scale and borders between geographical units. They are uniquely well
positioned, with their attention to this problem, to develop data and information that
would aid the other social sciences in avoiding the frequent geographical misrepresentation
of social and economic processes.
