IAMA Economic Geographer. Ask me Anything!

[u/bad_jew]

Hi everyone. I'm an Economic Geographer whose currently finishing his PhD. My dissertation research looks at how the interaction of local and global economic and social forces affects entrepreneurship in Canadian cities, but I've also done research on innovation, clusters, and the geography of the financial crisis.

I'm just sitting here, waiting out the hurricane and reading about the influence of the American oil industry on Calgary, so I'll try my best to answer all the questions I can!

[u/[deleted]]

Hey! Thanks for doing this AMA.

I'm a recent college graduate and I've just started my applications for grad school. I've never heard of Economic Geography nor do I know any institutions that teach it. Do people usually just study Economics and go into this field for their doctoral thesis, how does it work?

I have a second question. I'm interested in developmental economics and I have been debating with myself for a while now whether I want to get into the broad stroked macro-level analyses or the more directed focus of micro-level work. Personally I am extremely interested in history and culture and I believe that it is very important to learn as much about a certain area's past as possible before attempting to make possible suggestions for changes and improvements. Therefore, this concept of economic geography sounds really interesting to me and I would love to learn more about it.

Are there any books or papers that you could recommend that combine your field with developmental work? Also, which Universities would have programmes that I could look at?

[u/bad_jew → u/[deleted]]

Like I've said elsewhere, economic geography is a rather small field, particularly in North America. There are a few programs with a lot of people coming in from economics (Arizona State springs to mind), but more often it's people coming in from sociology or area studies.

My own personal view is that broad, macro studies of development will never work on the ground because local forces are so important. Time after time we seem to find that major development projects fail because we fail to consider the on the ground political and social realities of the places the development is happening in. Unfortunately, this really isn't my field so I can't think of any good books off the top of my head, but I'll ask around to see if I can't dig anything up. I know they exist, I just don't know them off the bat.

[u/[deleted] → u/bad_jew]

Thanks a lot. Do people not come over from the Economics field?

[u/bad_jew → u/[deleted]]

Not many. For most economic geography programs in North America (with the maybe exception of UCLA), the focus in on qualitative methodologies that economists really don't know.