Economic Geography, Quantitative

Abstract

Quantitative economic geography (the use of mathematics to conceptualize economic geography and advance propositions about the nature of the observable spatial economy) emerged in economic geography through research on location theory and spatial interaction during the 1960s. Alongside theory construction, methods of spatial statistical analysis were developed to evaluate the empirical predictions and fit of such theories. This approach was reinvigorated by economists during the 1990s, developing a perspective that has been dubbed ‘the new geographical economics’. Notwithstanding associations within this literature, and beyond, of quantitative reasoning with neoclassical economic geography and logical empiricism, a different kind of quantitative economic geography also emerged in the 1990s: regional political economy. While both approaches use mathematical reasoning to develop their theories, regional political economy is distinctive in its association with Marxian political economy; its conclusion that the capitalist space economy is not self-regulating but exhibits persistent out-of-equilibrium dynamics; its treatment of the spatiality of political economic processes as endogenous rather than exogenous to those processes; and its rejection of logical empiricism in favor of sociospatial dialectics. Quantitative economic geography is, thus, much more diverse than is generally presumed.