Geography
Economic Activity
Economic activity refers to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a specific geographic area. It encompasses all the actions and transactions that contribute to the overall economic well-being of a region, including agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and services. Understanding economic activity is crucial for analyzing the development and prosperity of a place.
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8 Key excerpts on "Economic Activity"
eBook - ePub- William P. Anderson(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Part I Fundamental concepts
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1 Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9780203114988-2Economic geographers study and attempt to explain the spatial configuration of economic activities. Economic activities include all human actions that do one of three things: (1) produce goods and services, (2) transfer goods and services from one economic agent to another, and (3) transform goods and services into utility through acts of consumption. All of these activities must take place somewhere – but where? Why does a firm elect to locate its factory in a particular country, region, locality and site? Why is a retail outlet located on a main street, along a highway or in an enclosed mall? Why does a household choose to reside and consume in a particular city, suburb or rural county? These are the questions that economic geographers seek to answer.The answers to these questions depend on the decisions of a large number of interacting economic agents – firms, households, governments, and various private and public institutions. Each agent’s choice depends on choices that have already been made, or are anticipated, by other agents. Furthermore, all decision making is influenced and constrained by the spatial distribution of environmental resources such as minerals, climate, landforms, vegetation and natural transportation corridors.If it sounds complicated, it is. The role of the economic geographer, however, is to perceive order in all this complexity, to untangle webs of interrelated decision making and to elicit some basic principles that drive the evolution of the economic landscape. One way to do this is by building models, which attempt to abstract away from superfluous details and incidental interactions in order to focus on the main driving forces of the spatial economy. One must be careful though, complexity may in itself have implications for the evolutions of spatial patterns. Excessive abstraction may preclude an understanding of such implications.
eBook - ePub- B. W. Hodder, Roger Lee(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Finally, the concept of the economy underlies the logic of the discussion in the sections that follow. The next chapter presents a selective review of literature in the field of economic geography against the background of the concept of the economy developed so far. Then follows the second and longer section of the book in which there is a discussion of the mechanisms of decision making and control. This involves a study of demand, supply, price and the market mechanisms; the alternative or complementary role of government control; and the decision-making activities of consumers, firms and resource owners. The third section of the book takes a closer look at the physical expression of integration within and between economies in the form of flows of goods, people and ideas, and the spatial structure of market centres and transport networks. The final section is devoted to a brief review of the geography of economic growth and development. This is a rapidly growing field of applied economic geography and demonstrates the apparent inability or unwillingness of the world economy to redistribute economic power or wealth from the rich to the poor. Intolerable economic inequalities, whether structural or spatial, and the associated ecological implications of the great but highly concentrated productive power of the world economy are perhaps the two major problems facing mankind. Passage contains an image
2 Geographical studies of Economic ActivityThe concept of the economy has rarely been used explicitly in geographical studies of Economic Activity; economic geography, in general, has been concerned with matters other than the operation of economies, the behaviour and interaction of their elements or the implications of the prevailing distribution of economic power. Within the existing literature in economic geography it is possible to distinguish two overlapping approaches to the study of Economic Activity. Systematic approaches are normally defined in terms of specific products (e.g. wheat), sectors (e.g. energy) or processes (e.g. trade), and are concerned with the spatial structure of these phenomena. Spatial approaches are defined in terms of specific two-dimensional, abstract, national or regional space and are concerned with the spatial structure of Economic Activity within these areas and with the effects of Economic Activity upon their economic and regional character.Systematic approaches
An early emphasis in economic geography was upon the scientific study of world areas in their direct influence upon the production of goods (Götz 1882). This approach sought to lay bare the influence of the natural environment upon the occupations, products and lives of people in different regions of the world (Wooldridge and East 1966). The best-known example of this approach is Chisholm’s handbook of commercial geography
eBook - PDF- R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Made Simple(Publisher)
Secondly, human activity over the earth's surface can be studied part by part. This is the approach of systematic geography, which isolates particular elements such as agriculture, industry or transport, and seeks to understand their spatial patterns and the processes which have produced them. The systematic approach is currently much more important, although regional geography was dominant until about 1950, and economic and social geography are the major areas of study in systematic human geography. These focus on different aspects of human activity but are very closely interlinked. Social geography is concerned with man and how he lives : with the geogra-phy of population and settlement; with the forms and processes of social interaction in space; and with the cultural attitudes that produce landscapes and affect ways of life. Economic geography is concerned with how man makes a living: how he utilises the resources of the earth, applies his technology to agriculture and industry and how he develops transport methods to rearrange space to his advantage by bringing sources of supply and demand closer together. 2 Economic and Social Geography Made Simple Current Approaches to Human Geography Although it is not easy to say what geography is about, there are at present two major approaches to human geography which influence the questions that geographers ask and the methods that they employ. Geography is first con-cerned with the study of man's relationships with the environment in which he lives, and secondly with the study of how man uses and organises space. These can be considered as two systems, or structures within which all parts are related to each other to form a functioning whole.
eBook - PDF- Neva Goodwin, Jonathan M. Harris, Julie A. Nelson, Brian Roach, Mariano Torras, Jonathan Harris, Julie Nelson(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Although this may look like inactivity, includ-ing resource management as an Economic Activity implies that minimizing some kinds of production or consumption can contribute to well-being. Throughout this textbook you will find many examples and analyses of the four basic economic activities listed above. The first half of the book, dealing with microeconomics, will contain the largest portion of the material on production and consumption. transfer: the giving of something, with nothing specific expected in return in-kind transfers: transfers of goods or services consumption: the final use of a good or service saving: refraining from consumption in the current period C HAPTER 1 – E CONOMIC A CTIVITY IN C ONTEXT 48 However, as we have noted, a particular aspect of production — savings and investment — will be cov-ered in greater depth in the second, macroeconomics, part of the text. The other two activities, distribu-tion and resource management (especially, but not exclusively, the management of natural resources) will be treated in both parts. 3.2 T HE T HREE B ASIC E CONOMIC Q UESTIONS The four economic activities that we have listed give rise, in turn, to the three basic economic questions: 1. What should be produced? 2. How should production take place? 3. For whom should Economic Activity be undertaken? For example, a family faces the problem of how much of its economic resources (money, credit, and so on) to use now and how much to preserve for future use. Suppose that members of a family decide to spend some of their money on a dinner party. They will have to decide “what” foods to pre-pare. The “how” question includes who is going to cook and what recipes to use. Answering the “for whom” question means deciding who will be invited for dinner and how to take into account the food preferences and needs of the various individuals.
eBook - PDF- Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, Linda McDowell, Peter Sunley, Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, Linda McDowell, Peter Sunley, SAGE Publications Ltd(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Economic geographies are, there-fore, both social and material, and both are inseparable from one another. However, to illustrate these ideas, it is perhaps easiest to deal separately with the material and social relations of economic geographies. where P is production, C is consumption, euv is the exchange of produced use values, elc is the exchange of labour power or other inputs into production, and pC is the productive consumption diverted from immediate con-sumption. What this simple diagram shows is that economic geographies involve the circula-tion of value (that is, material and immate-rial items of value, worth or use) from consumption, via various forms of exchange (for example, labour markets) to produc-tion. From there, again via processes of exchange such as the markets for goods and services, value flows back to consumption or, if instead it is directed to markets for the means of production such as property, machinery and infrastructure or the markets for finance which provide the investments necessary to enable production to take place once more, value flows directly back to production. If societies are to be capable of material reproduction – if, that is, they are to be able to engage in the social and material struggles involved in making a living – people must be able to construct and to participate, actively or indirectly, 5 in circuits of value. And these circuits, in turn, must be capable of produc-ing and exchanging at least as much material value as they consume. Such an engagement involves the transformation of nature in order that participants in circuits of value may pro-duce, circulate and consume use values. 6 Even in this elemental material sense, circuits of value are inherently geographi-cal. For one thing, they involve the perpetual but forever changing movement of value through circuits of value from consumption – – – – – – – – – euv C elc P euv C elc P euv | | ---------pC --------
eBook - ePubEconomy
Critical Essays in Human Geography
- Ron Martin(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Yet even when economists talk of the ‘international economy’, or the ‘global economy’, these are typically conceived of in terms of interactions between spaceless national economies. Recently, Hodgson (2001) has criticized economists for having forgotten the importance and role of history. For the most part, economists have also neglected the importance and role of geography, space and place. 1 The aim of economic geography is precisely to demonstrate why space, place and location are central to a full understanding of ‘the economy’ and ‘the economic process’. Geography would be unimportant if economic growth and prosperity occurred equally everywhere. Patently, from the evidence of the world around us, that is not the case: economic development does not occur uniformly across geographic space, but rather differs in degree and form as between different locations and places, producing spatial inequalities in economic growth, prosperity and well-being as a result. Indeed, geographically uneven development appears intrinsic to capitalism, for it occurs at a whole variety of spatial scales within nations, between regions, cities and localities. For economic geographers, then, the economy does not reside on the head of the proverbial pin, but is spatially structured in ways that have different outcomes and consequences in different places. Geography is in fact integral to capitalism in a dual sense. At one level, capitalism uses space in its constant search for new market opportunities and more profitable locations, what David Harvey once described as new ‘spatial fixes’, and others have called ‘spatial divisions of labour’ (Massey, 1984; Storper and Walker, 1984). In so doing, capitalism continuously creates and destroys economic landscapes
eBook - ePub- Roberta Capello(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Introduction 1 Economics and space Economic Activity arises, grows and develops in space. Firms, and economic actors in general, choose their locations in the same way as they choose their production factors and their technology. Productive resources are distributed unevenly in space: they are frequently concentrated in specific places (regions or cities) while they are entirely or partly non-existent in others. Quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the geographical distribution of resources and economic activities generate different factor remunerations, different levels of wealth and well-being, and different degrees of control over local development. The problem of factor allocation – which economists have conventionally treated as being the efficient allocation of the factors among various types of production – is more complex than this, in fact; and it is so because the spatial dimension is of crucial importance. Space influences the workings of an economic system. It is a source of economic advantages (or disadvantages) such as high (or low) endowments of production factors. It also generates geographical advantages, like the easy (or difficult) accessibility of an area and a high (or low) endowment of raw materials. Space is also the source of advantages springing from the cumulative nature of productive processes in space: in particular, spatial proximity generates economies that reduce production costs (e.g. the transportation costs of activities operating in closely concentrated filières) and, in more modern terms, transaction costs (e.g. the costs of market transactions due to information gathering). These considerations highlight the need to supersede the purely allocative approach typical of a static interpretation of economic phenomena with a dynamic, indeed evolutionary, approach which ties allocative decisions to processes of development
- Gary Cook, Jennifer Johns, Frank McDonald, Jonathan Beaverstock, Naresh Pandit, Gary Cook, Jennifer Johns, Frank McDonald, Jonathan Beaverstock, Naresh Pandit(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
p.175 PART III The interface between Economic Geography and International Business p.177 11 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS Henry Wai-chung Yeung Introduction The development and emergence of economic-geographical studies of International Business activities is an important topic. As these cross-border intra- and inter-firm activities are becoming more globally interconnected and interdependent today, their management and governance by firms, states and other institutions is much more challenging and complex. The geographical foundations and specificities of this phenomenon in a globalizing era has become a crucial research question for the academic fields of Economic Geography and International Business studies. Indeed, both fields are nested within the larger disciplines – respectively in human geography and in strategy and management studies. Both fields are primarily concerned with descriptions and explanations of real-world economic phenomena in the world. There is thus much commonality between Economic Geography and International Business studies. In this chapter, I focus on two key issues that speak well to the interface between Economic Geography and International Business studies: (1) the geographical nature of International Business and (2) the theorization of spatiality in International Business studies. The first issue is fairly obvious in a global economy characterized by densely interconnected networks of firms and economies operating at different geographical scales. In short, there are clearly visible geographical foundations to International Business activities (Yeung, 2005a, 2009a). While the role of physical location and distance has been conceptualized in some leading theoretical perspectives in International Business studies (e.g. Dunning, 1998, 2009; Buckley & Ghauri, 2004), the nature of spatiality entails much more than location as a production factor, an agglomeration economy, or a competitive advantage
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