ABSTRACT
With the advent of economic globalisation has come a renewed recognition of the salience of agglomerations or clusters of production in the contemporary economy. Interestingly, this recognition and the explanation of geographical specialisation has become central to two competing strands of what has been termed the ‘new economic geography’. On the one hand there is the new ‘geographical’ economics associated with leading names such as Paul Krugman, Michael Porter and W. Brian Arthur. Focused on the spatial agglomeration of industry and long-run convergence of regional incomes, this work has attracted sympathetic but ultimately critical reviews from economic geographers (Dymski 1996; Martin and Sunley 1996) with, for example, Martin (1999a) concluding most recently that ‘ “the new geographical economics” represents a case of mistaken identity: it is not that new, and it most certainly is not geography’, (p. 3).
