Economic Sectors

7 Key excerpts on "Economic Sectors"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Economic Geography

  • William P. Anderson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Fundamental concepts Passage contains an image

  1 Introduction

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203114988-2

  Economic 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.

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  The Economic Ascent of the Hotel Business

  • Paul Slattery(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Goodfellow Publishers

    (Publisher)

   Primary industries include: cultivation of crops, livestock production, fishing, forestry and hunting.  Secondary industries include: construction, manufacturing, mining, quar-rying and utilities.  Tertiary services include: banking, bars, betting shops, bingo clubs, casinos, cinemas, communications, distribution, education services, financial serv-ices, health services, hairdressers, hotels, insurance, personal services, professional services, public administration, restaurants, retailing, security services, sports clubs, storage, transport, travel, theatres, visitor attractions and welfare services. Within each of these activities there are sub-divisions that extend tertiary activities throughout the lives of citizens of advanced economies and establish the tertiary segment as the most diverse and complex of the three economic segments. Employment in each economic segment is different. It requires different knowledge and skills and it involves different relationships with the land, with machines, with colleagues and with the buyers of their output. As the structure of an economy ascends through the economic stages, so its structure becomes more complex and diverse. At any one time within any economy there are skills and jobs that are in demand to deliver economic output, others that are in decline and vanish and others for which demand has yet to materialise. As a result, the availability of 1: Economic Structure 3 products and services is not constant and their provision and consumption is not uniform. Except during the earliest pre-economic period of history, each country had some involvement in primary, secondary and tertiary economic activities and its economic structure was determined by the amount and types of activity in each segment. Historically, tertiary was the least significant activity since most tertiary services existed only as a necessary support to the production, distribution and sale of agricultural and manufactured goods.

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  The Routledge Companion to the Geography of International Business

  • 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)

  The on-going vitality and diversity of the Anglophone economic geographical research programme promises a bright future. Its practitioners, however, must be willing to engage constructively with one another and with scholars in cognate disciplines like economics and business studies. Economic geographers examine how economic processes shape, and are shaped by, geographical space (place, scale, connectivity, mobility); they examine how economic processes co-evolve with political, cultural and biophysical processes; they study how subject formation and identity at one end, and global political economic structures at the other, are interrelated; they take an interest in non-capitalist economic processes, and are critical of the proposition that regulated capitalist markets optimize societal wellbeing and ecological sustainability. Real-world oriented, economic geographers study some of the major challenges facing contemporary human society and its relation to political economic processes: global production networks, the politics and culture of consumption, work and labour, the role of state regulation and governance institutions, nature-economy relations, financialization, globalization and development, and diverse economic systems.

  p.126

  Of course, there are gaps in Economic Geography’s research programme. For example, much more needs to be done on logistics, a key to globalization, as well as on the frightening and pressing environmental challenges that the world faces such as global climate change. It is our hope, though, that these and other issues will be taken up in the spirit of engaged pluralism across different approaches, national communities and related disciplines.

  References

  Amin, A. & Thrift, N.J. (1992) ‘Neo-marshallian nodes in global networks’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 16, pp. 571–587.

  Baldwin, R. (2006) Globalisation: The Great Unbundling(s) . Helsinki: Prime Minister’s Office: Economic Council of Finland.

  Barnes, T.J., Peck, J. & Sheppard, E. (Eds.) (2012) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography

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  The State of the Art in Small Business and Entrepreneurship

  • Pierre-Andre Julien(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite these difficulties, and the variations to be taken into account according to the different small business types, we will attempt to summarize the main points of the current state of knowledge regarding the geographical distribution and location of small businesses, for various spatial scales. The chapter is divided into sections dealing with the commercial, service, and manufacturing sectors. The primary sector, including agriculture and mining, is excluded, as are construction, transportation, storage and finance (except banks). Each section is further subdivided to distinguish between geographical distribution and business location.

  It is important to mark the distinction between these two fundamental concepts. In geography, the expression “geographical distribution” is passive rather than active in meaning, since, with die exception of certain new services provided by the State (such as regional environmental services), no active, deliberate distribution of commercial, service-related or industrial activities in a given territory is actually carried out. Rather, the distribution results from a series of micro-decisions made by individual entrepreneurs, and the expression takes on a passive, static meaning that describes the arrangement or distribution of a given number of objects (in this case small businesses) in space. The expression “location” refers to the identification of a place or space in which to install a given object. Thus, location studies are carried out before a commercial or industrial activity begins, whereas geographical distribution studies take place at some point after activities have begun. The term “location” is thus dynamic, whereas the term “distribution” is essentially descriptive.

  After presenting a brief summary of existing distribution and location studies for commercial activities (including services for which a uniform demand exists throughout a given territory), for specific services (public and private) and for small manufacturing operations, we will underline the differences and similarities observed as regards location, especially for the purposes of analysis.

  2. Geographical distribution and localization of small businesses in the tertiary sector

  In this section, we will examine the main elements influencing the geographical distribution of businesses, and then the stages of a business location study. A large amount of material exists in this field, and the discussion here will be limited to a description of the essential characteristics of each model, with emphasis on small businesses. It is not our intention here to discuss the operational definition of a tertiary-sector small business (c.f. introduction) given the numerous theoretical and methodological difficulties presented by such a diversified sector of activities. The central place theory will be described first, followed by a discussion of location studies and of specific examples of certain public and private services.

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  Dilemmas in Regional Policy

  • Antoni Kuklinski, Jan G. Lambooy, Antoni Kuklinski, Jan G. Lambooy(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Agriculture's regionalisation Shaping of territorial production complexes • Location theory •General and detailed location • Sectoral location (industry, agriculture, transport, etc.) -Branch and complex location-. Interregional intraregional location. »Settlements theory--Country's and regional networks --Urbanization -Rural settlements Infrastructure distribution theory -Country and regional infrastructure-Techno-economic and social infrastructure -•I Country and regional spatial systems [<-constitute the essence of the measure taken and decisions made within the framework of regional economics. By virtue of its interdisciplinary nature, regional economics permits taking account of a number of preconditions for social, economic and spatial developments. The scope of regional economics embraces, moreover, also spatial aspects of all the problems that are solved in practice by socio-economic and regional policies, by nationwide and regional developmental strategies, and by national and regional planning, especially in their concrete forms of plans for various time intervals. The enumeration itself, of the disciplines directly connected with regional economics and affecting significantly the character and subject of its interest, is good evidence of the necessity of many-aspect studies and researches to disclose the interrelationships and dependencies at the 52 Kazimierz Secomski interdisciplinary level. One essential distinctive feature of the specific tasks regional economics is to fulfill is the criterion of region and its needs, that is, the implicit emphasis on the solution of the problems of rational socio-economic and spatial development in the region within the scope of regional economics. This, however, is not to say that regional problems may be solved in isolation from the entire body of nationwide or international phenomena and processes of development.

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  Economic and Social Geography

  • R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE: THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY CHAPTER ONE MAN AND ENVIRONMENT Geography is currently going through an exciting period in its development as new problems are identified and new methods of analysis are formulated. It is not easy to say precisely what geography is about because geographers often hold different views of the subject, and these views change from time to time, but this is not surprising since geographers are interested in a very wide range of problems and rapid advances are being made in the subject, as they are in all branches of knowledge. Because geography involves such a wide range of knowledge, the subject has been divided into two major areas of study. The first of these is physical geography, which is concerned with the physical environment of landforms, weather and climate, soils, and plants and animals (see Physical Geography Made Simple). The second is human geography, which is concerned with man's activities over the surface of the earth. In many ways this is a false distinction since the activities of man take place within the physical environment, and the physical environment is considerably affected by these activities, but the divi-sion is a useful one and in this book the physical environment will only be considered in relation to man. Human geography can be studied in two principal ways. First, the earth's surface can be studied part by part. This is the approach of regional geography, which seeks to understand the unique character of an area as produced by the interaction of human activity and the physical environment. 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.

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  Economic Geography

  Places, Networks and Flows

  • Andrew Wood, Susan Roberts(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART I

  TRADITIONAL ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHIES

  Economic geography is a broad and diverse field. Today, a significant number of economic geographers, regional scientists, planners and economists continue to work with and refine concepts drawn from what we are labeling ‘traditional economic geography.’ Traditional economic geography not only has deep roots but continues to develop and evolve. However, it should be pointed out that many economic geographers (and other social scientists too) deliberately ignore traditional economic geography on the grounds that they are not motivated by the same sorts of questions traditional economic geography asks, they do not use the same sorts of methods it favors, and they have different understandings of the broader social and political roles of economic geography.

  So, what are the hallmarks of traditional economic geography? First, there is an abiding commitment to rationalism. By this we mean that traditional economic geography is based on assumptions that the world can be known through observation and that it is fundamentally an ordered word. That is, that there are regularities and patterns that need to be identified and explained by the economic geographer. Further, the world's orderliness, including its spatial patterning, is itself the outcome of orderly economic processes, treated in many accounts as laws of economic activity. Orderly economic patterns and processes, in traditional economic geography, are seen as the outcome of rational decisions made by economic actors; typically individuals and firms. These rationalist underpinnings have come in for considerable skepticism and criticism, as Trevor Barnes has detailed in his writings on the history of ideas in economic geography (1996, 2000). However, the powerful discipline of economics is very much based on these foundations, as is much so-called common-sense understanding of the market or the economy, so it is not surprising that the approaches of traditional economic geography continue to attract many and, as Paul Plummer indicates, they most definitely have not been ‘consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history’ (Plummer 2000: 28). Indeed, it could be argued that through the attention given to geographical questions by such prominent economists as Paul Krugman, traditional economic geography approaches have been reinvigorated in the past decade or so. Certainly, a major methodological goal of traditional economic geography and of economics, ‘being able to produce tightly specified models’ (Krugman 2000: 59), continues to exercise many.

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