Related variety and regional development: a critique

Harald Bathelt and Michael Storper

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

Keywords: economic geographies of places; evolutionary economic geography (EEG); regional development; regional specialization; related variety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L23 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2023-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-geo, nep-hme and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Economic Geography, 1, November, 2023, 99(5), pp. 441 - 470. ISSN: 0013-0095

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120162/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120162

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().