ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out economic geography of the three major economic zones of the twenty-first-century global economy: East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. The sheer quantitative disparity in economic output between these zones and the rest of the world (less than USD 15 trillion GDP in total) suggests that globalization might have been oversold. Many phenomena that are routinely described as global (e.g. value chains, markets, and trade) might in fact be regional phenomena. The most productive analytical strategies for studying the global economy are thus likely to be regional, comparative regional, or transregional rather than global. China is no doubt a big, important country, but China’s economic modernization was aggressively driven forward by firms entering China from the broader East Asian economic zone and from the US. The economics, sociology, and political science of globalization are becoming less and less relevant as the global economy coalesces around the three major economic zones.
