|
GLOBALIZATION, CITY-REGIONS, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Convened by:
Michael Storper,
Department of Urban Planning
UCLA
and
Allen J. Scott,
Center for Globalization and Policy Research
Department of Policy Studies, and Department of Geography
UCLA
|
Funds in support of this working group have been generously provided by the
Center for Comparative and Global Research, UCLA .
WORKING GROUP PARTICIPANTS :
John Agnew, Department of Geography, UCLA (jagnew@geog.ucla.edu)
Richard Appelbaum, Department of Sociology, UC - Santa Barbara (rich@isber.ucsb.edu)
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Department of Sociology, UC - Riverside (chriscd@mail.ucr.edu)
Gary Dymski, Department of Economics, UC - Riverside (dymski@mail.ucr.edu)
Edmond Keller, Department of Political Science, UCLA (ekeller@ucla.edu)
Deepak Lal, Department of Economics, UCLA (dlal@ucla.edu)
Edward Leamer, Anderson School and Department of Economics, UCLA (edward.leamer@anderson.ucla.edu)
Abraham Lowenthal, Pacific Council on International Policy, Los Angeles (afl@usc.edu)
Michael Mann, Department of Sociology, UCLA (mmann@ucla.edu)
Koichi Mera, Center for International Policy, Planning, and Development, School of Policy, Planning, and Development, USC (mera@usc.edu)
Ron Rogowski, Deparment of Political Science, UCLA (rogowski@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu)
Annalee Saxenian, Department of City Planning, UC - Berkeley (anno@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Allen Scott, Department of Policy Studies and Department of Geography, UCLA (ajscott@ucla.edu)
David Smith, Department of Sociology, UC - Irvine (DASMITH@UCI.EDU)
Michael Storper, Department of Urban Planning, UCLA (storper@compuserve.com)
Pierre Veltz, Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, France (Pierre.Veltz@mail.enpc.fr)
Richard Walker, Department of Geography, UC - Berkeley (walker@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Michael Watts, Institute of International Studies, UC - Berkeley (mwatts@socrates.berkeley.edu)
John Zysman, Department of Political Science, UC - Berkeley (johnz@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Preamble
Our objective in convening this working group is to examine the ways in which globalization interacts -- in both more and less economically-advanced countries -- with regional sub-national processes of economic growth and development. Our basic point of departure is a claim that powerful pressures toward agglomeration or metropolitanization of economic activity are combining with globalization to produce a new type of developmental dynamic. Globalization, we argue, is inducing intensified economic regionalization, and the peculiar regions (city-regions) that are consequently coming into being across the world influence in important ways the manner in which globalization is unfolding.
Globalization and the Regional Question
Almost all countries have historically faced a "regional question" in the sense they have typically been characterized by wide variations in levels of economic development and growth across their national territories. At the same time, as the writings of Pollard suggest, selected regions have historically constituted the principal conduits through which overall national growth and competitiveness have been achieved.
With globalization, the regional question is more alive than ever, and it also assumes many new kinds of economic and political characteristics. Standard theory predicts that economic integration will bring about convergence in levels of development and per capita income. The evidence on this matter is quite mixed, however. Incomes and productivity levels among the most advanced economies of the OECD have indeed tended to converge over the post-war period, though when we include less developed countries the picture is one of divergence. In the United States inter-state GDP levels per capita have tended to diverge since the mid-1970s, and in Europe, GDP per capita and income growth continue to have wide dispersion at the subnational regional level. Moreover, in virtually all countries, the continued growth of employment and population in large cities essentially means that dense urban economies constitute the fundamental motors of development. Thus, if the globalization of the most advanced economies appears to be associated with certain types of convergence, there is also powerful evidence that it is just as much associated with a newly uneven infra-national -- regional -- patterning of development. Particularly in less developed countries, the strongest increases in output, GDP and incomes are virtually always in metropolitan areas, and exported-oriented industrialization programs have intensified this condition.
Agglomeration and economic synergies
Agglomeration of economic activity is both a cause and outcome of growth. It is an outcome in that growth processes create complex patterns of inter-firm linkages, many of which are sensitive to geographical distance. Even in the age of the Internet, many linkages require geographical proximity, precisely because new technologies create an economic order more and more devoted to short-term, immediate reactivity in markets. Moreover, firms agglomerate to take advantage of specialized labor pools, and such specialization is increasing in the contemporary economy, with its premium on rapid reaction and the immateriality or knowledge content of production. Global market integration, by opening up vaster market spaces to firms, actually promotes geographical concentration, by making it possible for increasingly more specialized services and products to appear. In short, agglomeration intensifies even as the spatial reach of any given agglomeration extends further outward. The geographical concentration of economic activity also promotes learning and innovation (hence intensified competitive advantage) by promoting interaction and technological spillovers between economic agents. Much of this is captured in recent scholarly work on growth theory, which demonstrates that many of the external economies underlying economic growth are realized in specific geographical contexts via the process of agglomeration.
Consistent with the above, recent empirical research in economic geography has begun to suggest that globalization of the economy has launched us on a wave of intensive localization and metropolitanization in many different segments of the economy. Further, the different agglomerations brought together in this way are tied together via extensive global networks and divisions of labor.
Different outcomes of integration
Globalization does not have uniform geographical and economic effects on all nations and regions, however. The United States has strongly specialized regional economies and powerful sub-national agglomeration effects. In Europe, by contrast, industry developed behind protectionist barriers, and sectors are more widely dispersed there than in the United States. Latecomer countries (such as Spain, Ireland or Greece) exhibit still another pattern: they are undergoing strong increases in the specialization of their national economies, as their agglomeration effects prior to integration were weaker. Most of the industrializing developing countries are experiencing extremely strong agglomeration effects as manifest in the creation of primate cities, to the detriment of their peripheral regions. These primate cities are the principal links of these countries into the global economy of production and exchange. The image emerges, then, of a global economy which is a mosaic of large global city-regions, with many intermediate spaces at much lower levels of development.
In addition, there is evidence that much trade between the more advanced regions/countries and less advanced regions/countries is characterized by vertical product differentiation, such that the wealthier regions specialize in products (whether final or intermediate) with different factor services (and rewards) from their trading partners. This is the case within the EU (between the regions of northern and southern Europe), as recent research has demonstrated. If it is a general pattern, then there are very important implications for long-term income change in different parts of the global economy, as well as for potential conflicts over trade.
Economic issues
On the economic front, our working group will deal with the following major tasks:
1. Industrial organization and location: Precisely which activities are locating in metropolitan areas, and why is this the case? This involves bringing together economic geography, industrial organization, and the study of technological innovation. How are agglomeration economies being redefined by globalization?
2. The distribution of economic activities: Which sectors are becoming spatially concentrated, and which are spreading out as a result of global market integration? Are there significant differences in the agglomeration and specialization tendencies of economies North America, the EU and the Japan-Asia regions, and if so, what are their consequences for economic performance?
3. Incomes and output: What is the relationship between location patterns, trade patterns, and overall economic performance of regions and therefore what can we expect about convergence and divergence from this round of globalization?
4. Enhancement of growth in low-income countries: given the strong propensity for globalization to enhance geographical polarization of growth and incomes, what are the implications for economic policy for less-developed countries? What can local policy makers accomplish? What are the implications for the less-developed regions of the developing countries?
Issues such as these are already the object of intense political scrutiny within the European Union, and within a number of developing countries such as Brazil and Mexico. They also raise a number of cognate political issues.
Governance and institutions: the socio-political foundations of regional growth
The urbanization processes associated with globalization are causing the number of large city-regions in the world to increase rapidly. These are not the big cities of yesteryear; they are polycentric urban fields encompassing large territories. At least some of the social and institutional foundations of growth appear to depend on regional governance and institutions and not exclusively on national policies. The existing institutional structures of political and economic governance of these regions were developed under very different economic and geographical conditions. There is increasing evidence that they are not well-adapted to the economic and geographical processes underway today. Hence, the problem of governance of these complex economies now presents itself as one of the major challenges of our age. At the same time, many regions have become more politically independent and entrepreneurial, emerging as political actors on national and international stages. These circumstances open up another area for reflection by the working group. Above all, and building on recent work in many disciplines on the social and political construction of economic advantages, our group will examine the possibilities and limits of effective policy-making for regional development and growth. We will pay special attention to comparisons of the developed countries' regional governance experiences, and to the challenges faced by less developed countries in the current context.
|  |
