IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/120162.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Related variety and regional development: a critique

Author

Listed:
  • Bathelt, Harald
  • Storper, Michael

Abstract

Evolutionary approaches in economic geography have contributed substantially to the growing body of knowledge of regional development processes and their underlying mechanisms. One key concept in the literature on evolutionary economic geography is that of related variety. Herein, regional industry structure is represented through the level of related variety of technologies, skills, or outputs. The related variety concept proposes that regional economic development is favored when an economy diversifies into products or technologies that are closely related to the stock of existing activities. In this article, we raise substantive questions regarding the internal logic of the concept of related variety, its spatial expressions, measurement specifics, empirical regularities and biases, and its possible short- and long-term effects on regional development. Based on this investigation, we make suggestions for improvements to future research.

Suggested Citation

  • Bathelt, Harald & Storper, Michael, 2023. "Related variety and regional development: a critique," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120162, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120162
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120162/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    economic geographies of places; evolutionary economic geography (EEG); regional development; regional specialization; related variety;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L23 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Organization of Production
    • R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120162. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.