Shaping Regional Growth Paths

Call for Papers, Global Conference on Economic Geography, Colone, 24-28 July 2018

Organisers: Markus Grillitsch [1] and Markku Sotarauta [2]
[1] Department of Human Geography & CIRLCE - Center for Innovation Research and Competence in a Learning Economy, Lund University
[2] Faculty of Management, University of Tampere

Abstract: Regions have different preconditions to compete, innovate, and stimulate economic growth. Structural factors such as industrial composition, the size of the region, capital and labour endowments, and infrastructure partly explain regional growth paths. What remains unexplained are structural factors that are difficult to capture quantitatively such as institutions and agentic processes that underpin new path development. The current conceptualization of path-dependency in economic geography suggests that history shapes but does not predetermine the further development of regional and industrial paths. Embedded, distributed and foresightful agency comes into play as a major cause for new path development.

The special session is devoted to papers that i) disentangle the structural and agentic effects on regional growth, ii) provide insights into the interplay between structure and agency and iii) focus on the micro-level processes that cause new industrial path development in regions. Contributing to this line of inquiry, the special session invites papers that address questions of the following sort:

• To what extent, under which conditions, and how can agency contribute to regional growth paths beyond what could be expected due to structural preconditions?
• Which processes within and beyond firms underpin regional growth paths?
• What are the causal factors explaining new path development in (differnet types of) regions?
• How do different regional industrial paths interplay and shape regional growth paths?
• Why and how does regional path development differ by regional contexts?
• What is the role of policy in shaping regional growth paths?

Please submit before March, 15, 2018 via https://www.gceg2018.com/home.html. For more information, contact [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]