ABSTRACT
As an academic discipline, economic geography has held a subordinate position in relation to other branches of economics and business studies for many decades. Recently, however, there have been signs of a change. Thus, the influential economist Paul Krugman confessed in the early 1990s that he had spent his ‘whole professional life as an international economist thinking and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it’ (Krugman 1991c: 1).1 Along the same lines Michael E.Porterwhose work on competitive strategy ‘gelled the interests of a generation of scholars’ (Mintzberg 1990:124-125) —declared that his research on business strategy and national competitive advantage suggests that ‘economic geography must move from the periphery to the mainstream’ (Porter 1994:38).
