ABSTRACT

According to Paul Krugman ‘the most striking feature of the geography of economic activity is surely concentration…production is remarkably concentrated in space’ (Krugman, 1991a: p. 5). However, usually we refer to ‘economic activity’ and ‘production’, having especially in mind the creation of goods and services, and this attitude has tended somehow to obscure another crucial feature of the geography of economic activity: innovation is even more concentrated in space. The evidence suggests that technological and innovative activities not only generate externalities (spillovers), but these are often geographically bounded within the region or local context where the new knowledge was initially created.