ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an assessment of the contributions of International Business (IB) studies in order to understand how economic geography has been able to make a distinct and strategically important impact despite its modest scale compared to the critical mass of IB studies. IB scholars have been far from silent regarding the role of location, place and geography in affecting the growth of retail firms – a tendency that has become increasingly evident. An important contribution was the debunking of attempts to promote an overarching retail globalization thesis. Economic geographers are in the early stages of exploring the evolution of regulatory systems within host countries exposed to international retail capital and the subsequent effects on domestic retail competition. Economic geographers have become keenly aware of the implications for international retail development when the faith of the capital markets evaporates. Accounts of the globalization of economic activity within economic geography have increasingly taken the role of finance seriously.
