Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In economic terms, 1998 was a hard year in the Scottish Borders. The long decline in the region's woolen textile industry, due in large part to increasing foreign competition, was compounded by the closure of electronic components plants in response to over-capacity in world markets. The region has lost 3,000 manufacturing jobs in three years, and local commentators bemoan the region's poor communications and predict entrenched unemployment and out-migration. Just fifty or so miles to the North however, the economy of the city of Edinburgh provided a striking contrast. Buoyed by the devolution of political power to a new Scottish Parliament, media, legal, and other business services mushroomed, and financial services and tourism continued to thrive, despite rising congestion costs. The aim of this chapter is to review recent work on the causes of such pronounced local differences in economic growth. One of the key themes of recent economic geography is that despite the ever-increasing integration of local economies into global flows of trade and capital, such local economic differentiation remains endemic to capitalism, and may even be intensifying as transport and communication costs fall. Despite the numerous glossy predictions of the death of distance and the end of geography, local and regional differences in growth may be intensifying across the industrialized world. Thus, ... log in or subscribe to read full text