Development and Deindustry
CONCEPTS OF DEVELOPMENT
• Per capita GNP
– Mix of economies and social geography
• Some MDCs still changing slowly
Concepts and Approaches
• Classifying development
– Countries with high levels of urbanization,
industrialization, and high standards of living
– opposite end of the development scale
– The GNP index is commonly used to measure
development
Concepts and Approaches
• Classifying development
– Other measures of economic development
• Productivity per worker
• Dependency ratio
• Social indicator rates
– Some the same no matter what
• Acute classification of 1960s & 1970s
• “Developing countries”
– “Underdeveloped” vs. developed-developing
Concepts and Approaches
• The core-periphery model
• Core regions are those that have achieved high levels of
socioeconomic prosperity
• Periphery regions are poor and dependent in significant ways
on the core, and do not have much control over their own
affairs
• Semi-periphery regions exert more power than peripheral
regions, but are dominated to some degree by core regions
– Place-specific economic relationships
– Socioeconomic changes different everywhere
– Uses various spatial scales
• What about the map?
Models of Development
• Types of models
– Liberal models
• Assume that a) all countries are capable of developing
economically the same way, and b) that economic disparities
between countries & regions are the result of short-term
inefficiencies in local or regional market forces
– Structuralist models
• Treat economic disparities among countries or regions as the result
of historically derived powers relations within the global economic
system
• The Modernization model
– Rostow’s five stages of country development
1. Traditional
2. Preconditions of takeoff
3. Takeoff
4. Drive to maturity
5. High mass consumption
• Dependency theory
Global Economic Disparities:
Following History
Global Economic Disparities
• Conditions in the periphery
– Unstable governmental infrastructures
– Health issues & overcrowding
– Poor, fragmented markets; farms
– Extreme regional disparities
• Economic options
– Many look toward industrialization
– Various symbols of national “progress”
– Tourism and development?
A Changing World
• Change occurs almost everywhere
– Statistics not reflective of inequalities
– E.g., Collapse of the Soviet Union
– Marked improvement in some countries
– Due to major political and economic changes
– No longer use “Third World”
– Many routes to development
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION & THE
RISE OF THE SERVICE
SECTOR
Categories of Service Industries
• The manufacturing boom
– Fordist & Fordism
– Oil in the 1970s
– Service sector has three categories:
• Tertiary industries: provision of services (e.g.,
banking, retailing, education, etc.)
• Quaternary industries: collection, processing, and
manipulation of information & capital
• Quinary industries: high-level of specialized
knowledge or technical skill
– Lend greater meaning to “postindustrial”
Geographic Dimensions of
Economic Activity
• Wealth = success?
– Deindustrialization not much help
– Dominant cores
– Example of Britain
•
•
•
•
Old plants still operating
Decline in Midlands and northern England
Industrial relocation to city
No tax base
The New Intl. Labor Division
• US & UK
• Countries and regions outside the core that have
increased their manufacturing output most
rapidly
The New Intl. Labor Division
• Trade is a tertiary economic activity
• Debts have exceeded revenues
Geographic Dimensions of
Economic Activity
• New influences on location
– Service industries
• Many are NOT tied to raw materials or energy
• Market accessibility is more relevant
Specialized Spatial Economic
Patterns
Among world cities
Specialized Spatial Economic
Patterns
• Specialized economic zones:
– Manufacturing export zones
– High-tech corridors
• “Silicon Valley”; “technopoles”
– Drawbacks of high-tech industry?
Geographic Dimensions of
Economic Activity
• Tourism
– ~11 % of worldwide jobs
– Linked to increases in income & leisure
– Tourism has transformed many landscapes
around the world
• Theme parks; Disneyfication; “Mouseification” of
Broadway?
– > $4,000,000,000,000 (trillion) industry!
Time-space Compression Impact
Set of developments that have changed the
way we think about time and space in the
global economic arena
– Opposite of time-space convergence
– Faster transportation and communication
– Transition from Fordist to flexible practices
– Internet & World Wide Web
– Geographical distribution mirrors map of
“haves” and “have-nots”
Reading
• Torsten Häggerstrand, Time Geography
– A short review of Häggerstrand’s pioneering
work.
Discussion Topics
• Why do tertiary, quaternary, and quinary
industries locate where they do?
• Is our world “shrinking”?